Everyone is tired. Except babies. Teenagers are tired even if they sleep till 3pm. Many of us wake up tired, then spend the day alternately pepping ourselves up and then knocking ourselves out. I have heard of creatures who wake up feeling refreshed and jump out of bed thinking: "I have had exactly the right amount of sleep" – but I don't live among this tribe of Gwyneth Paltrow types and the people in my local health-food shop look to be on the verge of serious illness however many seeds they peck at.
Modern Britain feels tired and somehow lacking. We don't get our eight hours. Doctors are quite strict, saying that most of us can function on five or six hours' sleep and we exaggerate the hours tossing and turning. According to reports, sleeplessness can cause heart disease. So are we just greedy? What lies behind our self-diagnosed notion of sleep-debt? My sleep deficit is bigger than anyone can know …
Though I must not think this way. I learned in therapy not to call myself an insomniac because that is to hang on to an identity that I have to let go of. Yet the difference between functioning on little sleep and having a real sleep still feels huge. Stupidly, I don't do much to help myself. Most of us don't. We watch telly in bed, fiddle around, drink.
Sleep studies tell us that people can die after 11 days without sleep and I think back to the days when everyone took loads of speed. Is it true that some went mad but at least some housework got done? Lots of scientists are studying sleep right now as there is money to be made from our general fatigue. Rats die after 21 days without sleep. In the middle of the night I find these things comforting. At least I am not a rat: that would be torture. Horses nap standing up for only three hours a day, and some whales and dolphins don't sleep for a month after giving birth, so you moaners with babies think about that! Sleep is not the new sex. It's more important than that. Anyone can have sex any time.
Technology has made the sleep problem worse. We overstimulate ourselves while sedentary. (This is National Bed Month, by the way – but which month isn't?) You should associate your bed only with sleep. I learned this as my poor doctor sent me on a sleep course. The alternative was antidepressants (though I am not depressed) and they won't give you sleeping pills any more. The sleep course is basically cognitive behavioural therapy, which the NHS increasingly uses because it is cheap. The evidence that it works, however, is patchy. One of the things that concerned the therapists were my "thoughts" during those nocturnal spells of sleeplessness. Sometimes I think about rearranging the furniture or sometimes about the pointlessness of human existence. My mind must be taught not to think these things if I am to have a good night's sleep.
Anyway, I did four weeks at the "insomnia club" and soon realised that "not sleeping" is an umbrella term for everything from depression to physical problems to unemployment and the non-specific but epic stress of poverty. The stress of those in high-powered jobs pales in comparison. On the course, we were taught "sleep hygiene": you must only associate your bed with sleep. No TVs, no laptops, not even books. I think sex was allowed, but I imagine it would have to be scheduled because you must do nothing stimulating for two hours before you hit your "sleep window". The course was too short and there were too many people, but it definitely helped one man who had had terrible problems.
The other cure–all is mindfulness – which is now used everywhere. Who can knock meditation? Not even me. Mindfulness is basically Buddhism without Buddha but tally-ho.
What is certain is that my problem is more and more common. Like most things I blame this on Thatcher and her boasts of three hours' sleep a night, as if sleeping were a weakness. The reality is the opposite. We need to sleep because we need to dream.
While I accept technology has possibly made my sleeping patterns worse, I am thrilled to hear that scientists are now developing masks and probes that they can stick straight into my prefrontal cortex, which will induce the best kind of sleep. Drugs ruin the dream-sleep and increasingly dreams are seen as a way of increasing memory storage in the brain. Gamers interestingly report more active participation in their dreams, so I don't see technology in itself as bad. It is how we use and react to it that matters.
When we constantly complain about feeling tired, we are not actually talking about sleep deprivation but about something else. What is it then, this lethargy, this lack of energy, this malaise? It is a very strange deprivation, is it not? Maybe like Dali we should hold a key in our hand over a plate and the moment it drops, wake and produce something from our lucid dreaming.
Instead we buy Nytol, whine and feel permanently knackered. Plus just as that cartoon with the man on the computer says: I can't come to bed just yet, someone has said something wrong on the internet. I'll sleep when I am dead, I say to myself. Whatever gets you through the night … Sometimes that's the only thing that does.
