MAY 19, 2003 The phone rings and I jerk awake, adrenalin pumping, in full alert mode. I check the bedside clock: 11.15pm.

Jesus, what a time to ring. It must be serious. The police? Some kind of major family disaster? But no, it’s a vague friend, calling about something deeply trivial. “Can’t this wait till tomorrow?” I say groggily. The friend apologises, saying she had no idea of the time. The crossness and adrenalin keep me awake for three more hours, making me grumpier still.

MAY 20 Tonight it’s the turn of the neighbour’s burglar alarm to wake me up. He’s away on holiday, but luckily I have the keyholder’s number. It’s too late, he says. I patiently explain that this is the whole point of being a keyholder — accepting the possibility that you may have to get up in the middle of the night to turn off someone’s alarm. He takes a very long time to be persuaded. Another ruined night.

MAY 21 Someone up there really hates me. My two-year-old daughter keeps coming into the bedroom at hourly intervals. My wife Tiffany, as ever, sleeps through it because only one of her ears works and that’s the one she sleeps on. After the third wake-up I give up on sleep because I know that I’ll only be woken again.

MAY 22 I’m going to sleep like a log tonight. Surely. Except, I don’t. Though I’ve experienced low-level insomnia before — when I’ve had a cup of coffee late in the afternoon, say, and it has taken me an hour or two longer to drop off — this is in a completely different league.

Quite simply, I cannot sleep. Not at all. And I try everything. I count sheep, but my brain is a morose sludge and the sheep are too blurry to differentiate. I try praying, but God quite clearly doesn’t give a toss. I try deep yogic breathing, which does sort of calm the brain but simultaneously seems to make it more aware and lucid. I plump and turn over my pillow so many times that Tiffany wakes up and tells me to stop making so much noise.

As my night of torment wears on, I try forcing myself not to look at my bedside clock. Each time I do, it gets more depressing, as I calculate and recalculate how decreasingly few hours I have left before I have to get up. So I stop looking at the clock, only to become acutely aware of the chimes of a distant church clock which tolls every half hour. I count the chimes, wincing at how late it is. Worst are the grey hours between 3am and 5am . I wake Tiffany and tell her what a horrible time I’m having. She hugs me and sympathises and then goes back to sleep. Then the birds start singing and I realise how much I loathe birdsong. It begins to lighten outside and I damn the sun. I’m still holding out this vague hope that I’m going to get at least some sleep. You can’t not, can you? At 7.30am, the alarm goes off. I have indeed gone a whole night without sleep. I find the thought so shocking, so extraordinary, that I am almost elated.

MAY 23 My doctor prescribes a sleeping pill called Zopiclone. He says the thing to do is not to get too worked up when you can’t sleep.

“People always worry that they won’t be able to cope without sleep. But look at you: you’re surviving, aren’t you?” I concede that this is so. Indeed, I’m quite amazed how capable of functioning I am, in the circumstances. The doctor tells me it will all soon pass.

FEBRUARY 2004 My doctor was wrong. Nine months have passed, with innumerable sleepless nights. It’s as if my body has forgotten how to go to sleep. In my darker moments I fear that I may have lost the secret for ever. Sometimes I cop out and use pills — Zopiclone or over-the-counter Nytol, which works pretty well provided you take it early rather than as a weapon of last resort; sometimes I’m lucky and the sleep comes freely, out of nowhere; most of the time I lie there, trying to wrestle my mind into sleep because I hate doing the pills too often: you end up so fuzzy the next day that you wonder whether it would have been better just to skip a night’s sleep. The mind-wrestling is futile. The more you start trying to analyse the process, the more active your brain becomes.

FEBRUARY 13 To Harley Street, to see one of Britain’s top sleep specialists. Dr Irshaad Ebrahim, of the London Sleep Centre, tells me that I’m suffering a textbook case of primary insomnia. This sounds very grand but all “primary” means is that there’s no obvious cause. Dr Ebrahim is brisk, hugely confident that he can cure me and keen to put me on pills, including antidepressants. This approach is quite common among doctors, many of whom treat insomnia exactly as they would depression. Dr Ebrahim believes my insomnia is very likely the result of low levels of the brain chemical serotonin. Which may be true but I don’t want to go on Prozac, lest it turn me into a zombie or damage my creativity. But I do take his prescription for a new sleeping tablet which doesn’t make you feel so drowsy the next day.

FEBRUARY 17 I’ve been hypnotised before but never so spectacularly as by the Harley Street MD-turned-alternative-therapist Dr Michael Seear. He’s a likeable man with a comforting manner and an infectious conviction that we all have the ability to heal ourselves. A few days ago, we had a preliminary talk about all the unresolved emotional problems — paranoia, excessive ambition, debilitating money worries, obsessive compulsive disorder, step-parenting issues, fear of change, depression, anxiety, rage, mood swings, etc — which may have led to my sleeping crisis.

Today, he’s going to hypnotise me in the first of two sessions. He asks me to sit in a chair, hold my hands apart, palms facing one another, and let my hands do what they want to do. All the while, Dr Seear is saying soothing, encouraging words which I hear as if from a great distance. Within seconds my fingers are twitching rather in the way a spider’s front legs move when it’s weaving a web.