Napoleon Bonaparte may have advocated six for a man, seven for a woman and eight for a fool, but for a growing army of insomniacs even six hours’ uninterrupted sleep is a luxury. Sleep is as vital as water, more essential than food, but for one in five of us it is as elusive as fairy dust.

Young professionals with a Starbucks habit, a BlackBerry addiction and a demanding boss are prime candidates as sufferers, but it is a condition that cuts across all ages and classes. Baroness Thatcher, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Scarlett Johansson have all suffered from sleep disorders. Finding the cure has become big business.

UK-wide, about 1m of us regularly swallow sleeping pills. Since the launch in 1998 of modafinil, a stimulant that allows people to get by on just four hours a night, sales have hit £330m. It may sound like the stuff of nightmares, but scientists are now working on a version that cuts the number of hours’ sleep needed to just two.

Our desperate search for the big sleep is leading us into bizarre territory. Marriott Hotels has started to pump “sleeping odours” through its air conditioning. Companies such as Leo Burnett and Procter & Gamble have installed egg-shaped snooze-pods in their offices for executive power naps. In America, shopping malls are introducing daytime siesta cells for worn-out shoppers. Ewan McGregor is one of a number of Hollywood stars who recently contributed a lullaby to Unexpected Dreams, a CD for insomniacs by insomniacs.

Sainsbury’s and Waitrose stock sleep-inducing milk, taken from cows when their melatonin levels are at their highest in the night. Add in the homeopathic and herbal remedies, the lavender oils, the special beds, the iPod pillows and the relaxation tapes and it is clear that there is nothing lethargic about the sleep industry.

Now clinical psychologists at Glasgow University’s Sleep Research Laboratory have devised a novel way of giving slumber- deprived Scots a passport to the land of nod. They are establishing the first night-school classes in teaching people how to sleep.

“Nowadays we see a lot of people with stressed lifestyles,” says Professor Colin Espie, author of Overcoming Insomnia and Sleep Problems and director of the university’s sleep laboratory. “Epidemiological studies show that 8% to 12% of the adult population have a diagnosis of sleep disorder and 20%-25% have a complaint about their sleep.”

From next month, sleepless in Shettleston and kipless in Kelvingrove will be able to sign up for an eight-week course on sleep, its nature and its management through the university’s department of adult and continuing education. It is based on a programme of cognitive behaviour therapy and sleep restriction techniques devised at the sleep laboratory, which the psychologist Marina Malaffo, who runs the course, says has a 70%-80% success rate.

Malaffo shows me around the sleep laboratory in the neurosurgery department of Glasgow’s Southern General hospital, where Big Brother-style cameras film the behaviour of the inhabitants of four specially prepared bedrooms and feed images through to a control room. Here, two night staff monitor the brain activity of the patients, who are wired up to portable machines.

Patients sleep for two nights at a time in windowless, air-conditioned and bland bedrooms. Malaffo explains that there must be nothing in the room to stimulate the patients. “We keep the temperature between 18C and 21C, which is the best for sleep,” she says.

Women are more prone to insomnia than men, as are people who suffer from anxiety. But for insomnia to strike, there also has to be a trigger or stress point, such as an illness, leaving a job or having a baby. “Most people go back to normal sleep patterns after such an event, but some don’t,” says Malaffo. They tend to reinforce the problem by worrying about it or adopting “messy sleep” habits.

An insomniac, according to Malaffo, is somebody who takes more than 30 minutes to fall asleep or is awake for more than 30 minutes during the night at least three or four times a week, with a subsequent negative impact on their daily lives. If it lasts more than six months, it is deemed chronic.

“It is not normal to be sleepy during the day, and if you are doing so with no obvious reason, it should be treated as pathological,” says Espie. “But the lack of awareness in the helping professions means that a lot of things go undetected.”

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth