Mr Sleepy Head

I have just returned from a trip to Oman and am desperately trying to adjust my body clock to match UK time. Even though there is only three hours difference between Muscat and my sleep has been curtailed by being jammed up in economy class like a battery hen on a flight that left Abu Dhabi at 2:30 and flew overnight.

I hardly got a wink of sleep, either smashing my legs on the seat in front or being pushed by somnambulists, walking down the aisle in a trance on their way to the toilet having quaffed too much liquid in the airport.

I arrived at home at 8:30 in the morning and went straight to bed. And today, a day later, I am shattered and don’t know when to sleep.

There are people I work with who follow the mantra of Mr Motivator, whose drive and desire to work at 200% mean that, in their opinion, there aren’t enough hours in a day. Such people think that I should have gone into work on Friday – for at least half a day, “because there is so much to do and the work won’t complete itself”.

I wasn’t asked directly – probably because the people concerned know that my response would have rhymed with “duck trough”.

I have many reasons to dislike (and for some people actually detest) those who follow the work ethics of Mr Motivator but lack of sleep and tiredness are major ones.

When I travel to a place like China, a journey that can last over 18 hours, I am expected to work as soon as I possibly can after I arrive. The first day of work is usually totally non-productive because of jet lag.

How people expect you to work, when the time difference is eight hours and you have travelled for almost an entire day on at least one long haul flight on an aircraft where sleep is utterly impossible, is totally beyond my comprehension.

Yet it happens.

And that is just the travelling aspect. I have heard Mr Motivator say absurd things like:

“Don’t believe people who say that you need a minimum of seven hours of sleep a night are just lazy. You can get by on four hours. Margaret Thatcher did – and so do I!”

Everybody needs a different amount of sleep. Not everyone is like Mr Motivator. I would go further and say that while Mr Motivator thinks he can get away with only five hours sleep, the reality is that he can’t. You will see him sitting there yawning occasionally and totally fuelled by caffeine to get him through the day.

I’ve done some research on this and I hope that Mr Motivator is reading because people really do need sleep. Here are ten effects of lack of sleep:

(1) Tiredness causes accidents. If you live miles away from work and have to drive on a motorway after only a couple of hours’ sleep, the chances of having an accident because of drowsiness and slow reaction times is vastly increased.

(2) You are more stupid. Lack of sleep impairs concentration and alertness and slows down your capacity to think clearly. In a job like mine, where I need to use my brain to solve problems, I need a full night’s sleep to make my mind sharp for the challenges of the day. This may explain some of Margaret Thatcher’s ridiculous policy decisions.

(3) You look older. Sleep deprivation can have a detrimental effect on your skin, as well as those bags under your puffy eyes, making you look as if you have aged a number of years.  The term “beauty sleep” was not coined as a joke. And it is quite clear that I need a lot of beauty sleep.

(4) Increased health problems. Being a hypochondriac, I wish I hadn’t discovered this. Lack of sleep can increase your chances of suffering from heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes and diabetes.

(5) Lower sex drive. Apparently age has an effect on your sex drive so if you are also not getting enough sleep then your libido will suffer. I can’t make myself younger (God knows I’ve tried) so I think I need more sleep.

(6) Depression. Depression is bad enough but if you can’t or won’t sleep because you are depressed, the  condition can be aggravated.

(7) Forgetfulness. As I grow older my memory is fading slowly but if you do not sleep enough, your already addled brain struggles even more to locate nuggets of information locked in your mind in little boxes labelled “Do not forget this”.

(8) You get fatter. Latest research suggests that lack of sleep can increase your appetite, causing you to eat more and therefore put on weight.

(9) Impaired judgement. Your brain suffers quite a lot because of sleep deprivation but as well as the effects mentioned above, your ability to assess situations correctly is also impaired.

(10) Increased risk of death. Possibly the scariest effect is that lack of sleep can increase the risk of fatal health issues.

If you are reading this, Mr Motivator, and think that I should spend more of my time working and not sleeping then you can think again. You may feel like you can survive on five or six hours’ sleep but I can’t. I need at least seven hours and I will continue to do that.

I am pretty sure that any readers who regularly wake up naturally after a full night of sleep will agree with me that there is no better feeling. You are refreshed, your brain is alert and you do not need a bulletproof caffeine injection to stimulate your groggy brain into action.

There may not be enough hours is a day for you Mr Motivator, but that is your problem and not mine.

I will not lose any sleep over your ill-judged advice, particularly if I have just suffered the ignominy of trying to sleep on a crammed aircraft next to a snoring bloater who is so fat that every time he moves, the entire aircraft shifts to the right, causing my knees to smash into the seat once more.

You should not have to adapt to a lifestyle created by Mr Motivator, dear reader; tell him to bugger off and get your eight hours of sleep.

You will feel healthier than he does.

I feel like starting a campaign.

Who’s with me?

Caffeine Bomb

I have a love/hate relationship with coffee - or more accurately caffeine.

It all started when I drank approximately a gallon of coffee to help me cram in all of the knowledge in my notes the night before my very last exam at university. Usually I was well prepared but a mixture of laziness and arrogance forced me to spend most of the entire night reading and rereading reams of notes in the hope that some of it stuck.

Caffeine didn’t help me. On the contrary, I think it made the situation worse.

The coffee certainly kept me awake but my brain was totally and utterly fried and I didn’t get a wink of sleep. Sadly my ability to retain facts and apply logic flew out of the window and headed south. That was the worst exam I ever sat. After the initial panic was over, I somehow managed to struggle through dredging my memory to scribble down vague facts related to the subject at hand.

I passed – barely.

As a kid I rarely drank coffee. I would have a cup to force myself awake for a newspaper round at 6am in the morning, but apart from that I was a tea junky. I didn’t actually realise that tea contains a fairly large quantity of caffeine too - that's how stupid I was.

I have always loved my tea to be so strong that I can stand a spoon up in it. I leave the teabag in the cup for as long as possible so that all of the flavour – and caffeine – drains into the hot water.  Yet paradoxically I cannot stand strong coffee.

I remember my first trip to Europe way back in the early 1980’s. My travelling companion at the time was a coffee addict who drank his caffeine bombs by the bucket load. We spent loads of time in coffee shops in Amsterdam drinking the strongest coffee I had had to that point. The taste stayed in my mouth for a couple of hours until it was time to grab the next one. When people ask me how I felt about my first trip abroad, I used to say “the beer and food tasted of coffee and I barely got any sleep at all.”

Amsterdam? No sleep at all? Yes – but not for the obvious reason. I was so high on caffeine that I mutated into a gibbering wreck.

My brain was overstimulated but my body was completely exhausted. My brain wanted me run around like a madman but had no idea how to channel the energy into something constructive. The conversations went something like this:

BRAIN: QUICK!! WE NEED TO DO STUFF!!

BODY: Yeah – sleep!

BRAIN: NOOOOOO!!! SLEEP IS FOR ARSES!!! GET UP AND DO STUFF!!!

BODY: Do what? I’m exhausted.

BRAIN: I DON’T KNOW – JUST DO STUFF!!!

Coincidentally, the first time I worked abroad was also in Amsterdam, and my Dutch colleagues used to constantly supply me with huge mugs filled to the brim with potent coffee. I somehow survived on around four hours sleep a night for the entire week I was there.

Gradually as I got older, I started to feel the effects of caffeine more. The tipping point was when I found myself in a bar in Manchester around fifteen years ago with a few friends who insisted on sharing a pitcher of Red Bull and vodka. Until that point I had no idea what Red Bull was and naively thought it was some kind of weird mixer for boring old vodka.

I do not drink spirits but on this occasion I succumbed to peer pressure and had a fair amount. Inevitably I was slightly the worst for wear, noticeably drunk but there was something else wrong. I felt alive and buzzing, so much so that I was actually shaking.

I arrived home, desperate for sleep but lay tossing and turning on the bed with my brain and body completely and utterly wired. I think I eventually passed out at around seven o’clock in the morning some five hours after arriving home.

Red Bull gives you wings indeed – the stuff is lethal!

So why am I blithering on about caffeine?

The reason is that for the past year or two I have seriously cut down on my caffeine intake. I have even purchased decaffeinated tea – which is not exactly the best thing in the world but still infinitely better than the swill you get in Europe and America.

I still drink full fat totally caffeinated tea at the weekend but during the week my sole drink of choice at work is decaffeinated coffee.

I have had some abuse for this. One guy said:

“Why on earth do you drink decaffeinated coffee? Coffee tastes like shit and the only good thing about it is the BUZZ you get. It gets me through the day. Drinking decaffeinated tea is like drinking alcohol free beer – totally pointless.”

Nevertheless, I actually feel better for it. I sleep better and I am reasonably calm at work instead of being so wired that I run around like a demented lunatic.

Some people say that coffee helps the true executive to function correctly, keeping his mind sharp and focussed so that he can be bulletproof. Mr Motivator cannot live without his coffee.

So what does caffeine actually do that makes Mr Motivator so dependent on it? Caffeine actually blocks chemical signals in your brain that tell you how sleepy you are and thus kick starts your mind when really, perhaps, it should be feeling sleepy. I think we all know this especially if we are coffee connoisseurs or Red Bull addicts. However, as well as telling your brain that you should be awake instead of asleep, caffeine enhances mental ability, which is where Mr Motivator comes in.

“I need my caffeine to function at 200%!” says Mr Motivator.

Your body can successfully break down caffeine within a few hours so perhaps my mistake when I sat my final exam was not to drink a monstrous caffeine bomb comprised of Red Bull, caffeine pills and espresso.

Well I can function without it. My mind is clear and relaxed and I don’t end up buzzing around like a wired wasp.

Having cut down severely on my caffeine intake, I find that I am still reasonably agile mentally which is good because I don’t really miss it. I still love my tea and I can channel my energy into something useful. I have no problem staying up later though I don’t drink tea after 5 pm and usually end up falling asleep around midnight in front of Match of the Day or that late movie I really wanted to watch.

And I sleep a lot better when I finally do nod off at the end of the day.

I think I could actually live without caffeine in my life at all.

How about you, dear reader? 

Can you function without full fat coffee or tea?

Is caffeine a help or a hindrance to you?

And have you ever grown wings through drinking Red Bull?

I have to say, speaking about Red Bull, that it is absolutely disgusting. The taste is abhorrent even when tainted with vodka.

What on earth was I thinking? That is exactly the drunken thought that raced around my head for five hours in the wee small hours of that fateful night - and how disgusting Red Bull tastes.

The Insomniac

Sometimes I suffer from insomnia and I have no idea why. I manage to get to sleep but, being a light sleeper I suddenly ping awake in the middle of the night and absolutely struggle to fall asleep again – until approximately two minutes before my alarm clock goes off for work.

I have tried several cures for insomnia and to be honest I find that a percentage of them work:

1%.

The vast majority of them don’t. I’ve tried them all.

Here are some that I have tried and that have failed spectacularly.

Reading

I love reading but I simply cannot read a bad boring book without ranting internally, something which fuels my insomnia. Sadly my favourite genres are science fiction, action thrillers and good old heart-wrenching blood-curdling horror; none of these work.

Science fiction sparks my imagination, something that is a true ally to insomnia.

Action thrillers have the same effect.

Horror books just scare the shit out of me and leave me lying in bed convinced that if I fall asleep a mad alien maniac will take me away and perform gruesome experiments on the most tender parts of my anatomy.

Drinking Warm Milk

Drinking warm milk does not work because the idea of warming milk was conceived in one of the more despicable think tanks of Hell itself.

Warm milk is disgusting and, if I were to survive the foul taste without vomiting, I would almost certainly wake up an hour later, desperate for the toilet and cursing because no amount of minty mouth wash can remove the lingering taste of rancid, stale warm milk.

Counting Sheep

Whoever thought that counting sheep was a good idea is an oddball. I have tried it but I find myself worrying about whether the field into which the sheep are so nimbly leaping into will be able to accommodate them. And then I start wondering why the sheep are jumping the fence into that field in the first place.

Is it a better field?

And why are they leaping over the fence one by one?

Is there a queuing system?

And are there an infinite number of sheep? There must be – because I have reached 2,345,203,334 – and there were still billions of the buggers left.

And what about the poor old sheep that can’t jump the fence?

Do they cry when they see the youngsters leaping over the fence, mocking their invalidity?

Also to be quite honest, I’ve never seen a sheep jump so I find the whole thing worrying and unbelievable.

And that fuels my insomnia.

Listening to Music

This has worked at least for a short while. I have a playlist on my iPod containing lots of mellow sleep-inducing melodies and they help soothe my raging insomnia. Sadly, even my mellow playlist contains a few, shall we say, more heavy numbers and invariably a loud blast of Judas Priest will wrench me from my slumber with maximum prejudice, making me leap out of bed in terror.

Writing a Novel in My Head

I have written around 2,532 novels in my head and they all have something in common – they are utter rubbish, so rubbish in fact that I beat myself up about how bad my ideas are and how, if they ever somehow find their way into print, people will ridicule my poor writing technique, my incredibly bad plots, appalling characters and extremely poor verbiage.

And that keeps me awake.

Lucid Dreaming

I’ve tried this and it doesn’t work. I can’t be aware that I am dreaming because when I am asleep I think I might be awake and when I am awake I think I might be asleep.  But I’m not. I’m either awake or asleep and not both awake and asleep or neither awake or asleep. The great Stan Laurel summed it up perfectly for me:

“I had a dream I was awake and I woke up to find myself asleep.”

Confused? Yes – I was and that kept me awake – or did it?

Not Thinking At All

This is impossible. I’ve tried meditation, clearing my mind of all things that might fuel my insomnia but when a random thought pops into my head I end up arguing with myself:

“Will you stop thinking about rubber chickens? You’re supposed to be clearing your mind.”

“I can’t help it. The thought just popped into my head and now I can’t get rid of it.”

“You’re a bloody arse! You can’t even do this one simple thing.”

“Leave me alone – now I’m stressed by your nagging and the rubber chickens are still there.”

Insomnia rubs its hands in glee.

Eating Cheese Before I Go To Bed

Cheese gives me weird dreams so I have tried eating a fair amount before going to bed. When I lie there in the darkness, I contemplate how magnificently bizarre my dreams are going to be and I look forward to them. Sadly, eating cheese before bedtime doesn’t agree with me and I end up having to get up to deal with a mild and extremely irritating bout of indigestion (see Getting Up later).

Hypnosis

I’ve tried hypnosis and this actually works. “Great,” I hear you cry. Sadly, Mrs PM recognises my trance state and has started suggesting things to me.

“You have an urge to clean the bathroom on a daily basis.”

“You hate rock music and consider Lady Ga Ga and Rihanna to be the pinnacle of music.”

“You have this desperate urge to spend money on things I want.”

Getting Up

I’ve heard that when you can’t sleep the best thing to do is to get up and watch TV or do something constructive. Sadly, TV in the middle of the night is so awful that I find myself ranting to the cats about the incredibly bland nonsense I am witnessing on the gazillion channels that I can see. I’ve tried writing a blog post – but that didn’t work either:

YOU’RE READING THE POST AND  I AM STILL AWAKE!!

Night Noises

Certain things invade my subconscious mind and return to bite me on my arse, usually in the middle of the night.

The other night, I was laughing at a documentary on TV about people who were convinced that they are constantly being abducted by aliens. As my conscious mind mocked these poor unfortunate wretches, their words somehow bypassed my mental firewall and occupied a deeper subconscious level of my brain.

It was like a time bomb waiting to detonate.

I am a light sleeper and can be woken up very easily (too easily!) by noises in the night. With three cats lurking around, I am often dragged from my slumber if they decide to scratch the carpet, fight with each other or simply turn over and start snoring downstairs. Suffice it to say, any other noises such as passing cars, people chatting as they walk past my house  and, in fact, my house itself, when it decides to creak or squeak, are enough to wake me up.

And, of course, when I am asleep, my imagination runs amok within my head, leading to bizarre and sometimes disturbing dreams, which unlock doors in mind full of seemingly inane drivel that has been registered there during my waking hours.

On the night I watched the documentary about alien abductees I was having a particularly vivid dream and the words spoken in the documentary suddenly exploded within my mind:

“I woke up and saw a grey alien standing at the foot of my bed; and then I was taken.”

Something woke me up. It was probably Jasper, my fat cat, snoring downstairs. It could have been anything.

All I remember is waking up with the words “grey aliens at the foot of my bed” ringing in my ears. I sat up and stared towards the end of the bed.

One more thing you need to know about me – I am as blind as a bat without my glasses.

Another thing you need to know about me – I do not sleep in my glasses.

What does this mean? It means that whenever I wake up, particularly when it is still dark, I am confronted by weird shadows of black and grey, together with other shapes that my eyes simply cannot recognize. Sadly, my imagination steps in where my flawed eyes have failed.

The weirdness of my dreams has allowed my imagination to run riot and invade reality. Suddenly, each shadow is menacing; each shape is an unspeakable horror.

What IS that thing at the bottom of the bed?

SHIT! IT’S AN ALIEN!

When I switched on the light, the anguished cry still echoing around the room, I groped for my glasses and discovered that “the alien” was a wardrobe that I have had for ten years and the only unspeakable horror was the anger of a very irate and very tired Mrs PM who was about to beat me back into unconsciousness for waking her up.

Night noises, for me, are a royal pain in the arse – sometimes literally when Mrs PM kicks me after I have woken her up thinking monsters are invading the bedroom.

It’s not always slavering beasts that I imagine are in my bedroom intent on devouring me. Such incidents are rare. My problem is that when I am woken up by a creak in the house I immediately think that there is something wrong and, since Mrs PM is in deep sleep and completely oblivious to my trauma, I am alone in my disturbed little world.

I lie there wondering whether the noise downstairs is a cat sharpening its claws on its scratch post or whether an axe murder is creeping up the stairs to dismember me.

There have been occasions when a night noise has been significantly loud enough to wake both of us up. Each time we have had a problem. Both my imagination and Mrs PM’s imagination collide resulting in us both scaring each other half to death.

PM: “Wassat?” 

Mrs PM: “It’s an axe murderer creeping up the stairs.”

PM: “An axe murderer? No it’s not – we’re being invaded by aliens that want to stick things in my nether regions.”

Mrs PM: “Oh – it’s the bloody cat scratching at the door for food.”

Believe it or not, we have been woken up by earthquakes. Yes that’s right – earthquakes in Manchester. The tremors were tiny but just powerful enough to scare me shitless each time.

The first time was just after we had moved into our current house. We were in the middle of redecorating and as a temporary measure, Mrs PM had propped a mirror against the window while the walls were being prepared for plastering.

When the earthquake struck, the mirror rattled against the glass and promptly fell onto the floor. I woke up imagining that scene from ‘Salem’s Lot where the vampire was hovering outside the window scratching to come in. I was halfway out of the bedroom, squealing like a little girl before I heard Mrs PM say:

“Bloody hell – that was an earthquake. It’s knocked the mirror over.”

The second time, the tremor was a little more powerful and this time I was woken up by the door rattling in its frame. To me it sounded like somebody (a mad axe murderer?) was trying to open the bedroom door. This time, I must have been dreaming about being a super hero because I leapt out of bed and, with the dream still present in my head, I pulled open the door and ran out onto the landing screaming like banshee, ready to annihilate whatever was trying to get in.

What made matters worse was the cacophony of car and burglar alarms, caused by the tremor, blaring out in the street in perfect chaotic harmony. As I stood at the top of the stairs in pitch blackness with the remnants of the dream vanishing I was filled with a sudden dread that this time, finally, there really was an axe murderer in the house.

I ran back into the bedroom, slammed the door and was about to dial 999 when Mrs PM, once again the voice of reason, said “Blimey – was that an earthquake?”

We also had a problem with Liquorice, the hellcat, when she first arrived. Our other two cats are either too lazy (Jasper) or too scared (Poppy) to climb higher than the settee. Liquorice on the other hand is small, slim and very agile and set about exploring her new home, usually at three o’clock in the morning, by leaping to the top of the bookshelf, kitchen units or anything that was above head height, just to see what the view was like.

The result? Yes – that’s right. The burglar alarm went off repeatedly, causing me to either squeal or thunder downstairs with a blunt instrument and racing heart to confront the alien or axe murderer that had invaded our home, only to find a hellcat laughing at me from the top of the bookshelf.

At least we have solved that problem and adjusted the alarm sensors to cope with Liquorice’s lofty territory.

Now, all I have to worry about are those little noises. I wish I was like Mrs PM, a woman who could really sleep through an alien invasion.

A deeply disturbed part of me hopes to see a real grey extra-terrestrial with a ray gun and an anal probe standing at the foot of the bed pointing at me.

At least then I’ll get the last laugh when I wake up Mrs PM.

The Light Sleeper

A few nights ago I had a weird dream. I was tied to the floor and a warm sticky substance was dripping relentlessly onto my exposed forehead. It was like Chinese water torture, only much worse; the dripping substance was slowly and inexorably drifting towards my mouth.

I can picture you reading this and I can almost sense the disgust in your mind but please bear with me - it's not as bad as you think (though it could have been).

As the drip approached my upper lip I started to panic; and as I panicked I began to hear an unearthly wailing sound.

And then I woke up.

Waking up for me is a traumatic experience sometimes because I am so short sighted that shapes take on a menacing significance. On this occasion, as my crusty eyes opened, I could see nothing. The room was dark and the feeble street light from the front window barely illuminated the room. And then I saw it; the blurred shadow directly above my head. My heart leapt; I almost screamed. And I’m glad I didn’t. If I had, a huge drop of cat saliva would have plopped right onto my tonsils.

“MIIIIAAAOOOWWWWW!”

Spike, our old, greedy, dribbling cat was perched on my chest, and howling for food. He was so hungry that he was salivating all over my head.

“URRGHHHH!!!” I screamed, and tried to turn over. Spike, thinking I was going to grant his wish for a tray of food promptly stepped onto my face before dropping to the floor, meowing incessantly. The racket was so loud that I decided to feed him. Because it was dark, I staggered out of bed, trod on Spike’s tail (causing him to screech in pain), bashed my knee on the bedside cabinet and hobbled downstairs. Spike, in revenge for the pain, tried his best to trip me up as I went. When I returned, Mrs PM was still fast asleep, oblivious to my trauma and pain. I was tempted to wake her up because it was her fault that Spike had woken me up in the first place. Why? Well, let me tell you a little bit of history.

When we moved into our new house we bought two black kittens called Jasper and Poppy and they were quite happy to sleep on our bed with us in it, in peace and harmony, moving only occasionally. However, when Spike, the cuckoo in our nest, arrived, he was so hungry all the time that he woke us up constantly at really anti-social hours. When I say “us” I mean “me". As you may have guessed, I am a very light sleeper and what annoys me most is that Mrs PM is the complete opposite.

I banned the cats from the bedroom and Mrs PM has struggled with this ever since I put my foot down. So to compromise, I foolishly allow them in the bedroom while we are reading, until it is time to turn off the light; then they are unceremoniously ejected from the room. On this night, however, Mrs PM had let the cats back in when I was asleep and, as usual, Spike had picked on me. Of course, he may have picked on Mrs PM first but waking her up is as difficult as trying to push a pea to London using just your nose.

Mrs PM can sleep through an earthquake – and indeed she has – twice! We don’t get earthquakes in England very often but Mother Nature decided to inflict one upon us last year. Being such a light sleeper, I was out of bed the nanosecond it struck. I was convinced that a burglar was trying to break down the bedroom door and in my confused semi-conscious state, I bellowed at the top of my voice, thinking that a burglar would flee if he thought that there was a maniac on the other side of the door. My screaming actually woke Mrs PM up on this occasion, as did the two hundred burglar alarms that immediately went off in the street when the tremor struck.

“What are you doing out of bed?” she asked in a bleary eyed state, before immediately falling to sleep again with a loud snore.

In these cold, dark winter months I can normally sleep quite well. It is dark when I retire for the night and stays dark until around eight in the morning. However, in the summer, in June in particular, it only begins to get dark at 10pm and by 4am it is light again and I find myself lying there in bed at 4:30 having been woken up by bright sunshine and the sound of the dawn chorus. I am so frustrated that I blame the cats for that as well. I’ve heard myself talking to Jasper:

“Call yourself a bloody cat? There are a hundred and forty two birds out there, making enough noise to wake the dead. Why don’t you round up the local moggy posse and sort the little buggers out?”

Jasper just sat there with that “Gimme food” look on his face.

When I complain to Mrs PM, she laughs and says “It’s not my fault you have transparent eyelids!”

Other things wake me up too, usually in the middle of a great dream. If a squirrel drops a nut in our front garden at 3am you can guarantee that I will be awake at 3am and one second wondering what’s making the racket outside.

I’ve tried wearing those blindfolds that they give you on aircraft. The problem is that I wake up with it still on and panic thinking that somebody has stolen my sight in the middle of the night, or find it missing and forget about it, only to rediscover it around my neck when I’m in the shower.

I’ve also tried earplugs with similar effects. Either I panic because I think I am deaf, or sleep through my alarm clock and end up at work two hours late.

Sometimes, Mrs PM can make matters much worse. She accuses me of being a duvet thief but the only person who wakes up on a cold winter’s night, shivering in the throes of early hypothermia is me.

Worse, she sometimes has a spontaneous, localised moment of being a light sleeper and suddenly screams out “What’s that noise?”. I get up, go downstairs, and usually find the cats having a party in the lounge, only to return to the bedroom to find Mrs PM snoring for England.

The worst thing about Mrs PM are her dreams.

Now I cannot read this woman’s mind but I certainly know when she is having a vivid and weird dream. Normally she cries out in her sleep, which immediately wakes me up. Sometimes, she wakes up, shakes me awake and asks a stupid question like “Why do the insects have to travel to Mars in a coffin? Surely the dentists will make them clean their paws first.” Then she falls unconscious again and starts snoring. I am such a light sleeper that her snoring keeps me awake for hours.

The worst episode involving Mrs PM and her dreams occurred the other week. There I was lying in bed in total bliss; I had caught the train to dreamland and was about to show my passport when suddenly Mrs PM kicked me. Furthermore, she kicked me so hard that I actually stumbled out of bed and landed on the floor. I was aghast. I woke her up and said “What the bloody hell are you doing? You’ve just bloody well kicked me!”

“Did I?” she replied. “I’m sorry. I was dreaming about a walking doll that wouldn’t stop chasing me; so I kicked it.”

And then she fell asleep and started snoring, keeping me awake for the rest of the night.

I need to take steps to combat my problem. How about ttaking these steps:

(1) Ban the cats from entering the room at all times when I am in bed.

(2) Buy a set of thick curtains that allow no light whatsoever to pass through.

(3) Soundproof the bedroom.

(4) Put Mrs PM in a straight-jacket.

Actually, I think one of those suggestions is a little extreme. I would cost a fortune to soundproof the bedroom.