Why do I lie awake at night? Because it kept my ancestors alive

Gloom begets gloom. Darkness is the perfect environment for anxiety. As I’m taking nightly refuge in bed, whatever anxieties I currently have enliven into a rude health they couldn’t hope to attain while I’m in daylight and din. A gutter that has rusted through is dripping outside my window, sounding like a bass drum keeping slow time for a funeral march. It is a noise that, during daytime, would be so unremarkable as to need someone to point it out to me. “Listen. Do you hear that? I think your gutter’s buggered.”

But at night, when the anxieties emerge gaudied from their dressing rooms and begin to dance across the stage of my mind, the dripping gutter keeps time for the worries that need immediate attention. The gutter itself must be replaced. Reminding me (drip) every five seconds (drip) of the accelerating deterioration of the house, the floorboards need polishing, the walls painting, and then, of course … the deterioration of everything, of the friendships, of the faculties, and the organs, the memory, the prospects, the dwindling likelihood of ever understanding crypto … life’s abstract imperfections blossom into a banal apocalypse given silence and darkness.

I’m a better friend to myself during the day than at night. I think we all are. Maybe the night brings honesty, a more accurate reckoning of who we are. Maybe I’m cutting myself too much slack as I skip through my days. During daytime, I get on well with the ghosts of my past – but at night they seem a degraded crew who never got off their arses to have a go. The “what ifs” and “I shouldn’t haves” mingle and mate in the mind until cause and effect give birth to a roughshod, idiot tribe of Ansons who have galloped headlong at disgrace.

It’s impossible to sleep with this going on. And sleep is a type of healing, so if you don’t get enough you rise sick in the morning. At one stage I was getting about two hours a night. You’d be amazed at what an abstract, removed world this becomes when you’re sleep-deprived, groggily walking around in a near dream. I was colourblind on two hours’ sleep a night. I’m a much better sleeper than that now and the world is, again, ablaze with colour.

Proust wrote in a cork-lined room so he had no distractions and his thoughts could be better heard. The stillness of night performs the same function as that cork room, allowing your worries to amplify until they’re like those Red Army propagandists bawling through speakers in the icy Stalingrad night across the frozen Volga at the frostbitten soldiers of the German 6th Army: “Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad. Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad.” A lot of people lie in bed listening to versions of that.

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The dark is where evil traditionally lives – the night was always a time of tension. In past nights carnivores loped across plains with their noses to the breeze for your ancestors’ scent – those who slept soundly woke in bears’ bellies and have no descendants. Witches ride brooms and every haint and devil is at their pomp in blackness; ghosts that are knock-kneed and pot-bellied in sunlight are warlords by midnight; muggers and hatchet men lean into suburban hedges waiting for passers-by.

A subconscious vigilance in the small hours kept our ancestors alive and it buzzes in us still. The brain is looking for threat and primed for negative thinking and, without the distraction of kids, PlayStation, and business meetings, becomes trapped in a negative loop. I used to try to get to sleep by thinking mild and pleasant thoughts. But my brain is as likely to be led into slumber by mental elevator music as a rhino is into a horse float.

Now I reach for my e-book. The room remains in darkness and Sarah undisturbed. The e-book is a portal into the waking world from the swamp of my nocturnal thoughts. A way out of the night, an escape hatch, a path to Shangri-La … to all those Neverlands authors offer. “I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works), and its bitter little embryos spying upon the love life of their parents.”

That’s Nabokov. Read a sentence that good at 3am on your handheld rectangle of light and it’s sure to put your demons to flight.

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