Insomnia brings out the absurd in all of us

Apr 2 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

‘WHY do undertakers have a preference for yellow cars?” I wonder during the early hours of the morning, after awakening from fitful sleep for the umpteenth time since I had gone to bed the night before.

The obvious reason would be that they are tired of wearing black and driving hearses but, on the other hand, police officers tend to go for blue cars, so maybe they quite like the colour of their uniforms.

Inane I know, but it was the best I could manage at that time in the morning, my limbs too exhausted to lift but my brain whizzing manically like a kid on Sunny D.

Pointless surveys aside, there is no shortage of absurd subjects to consider when it’s too late to get up again but there’s still ages before the central heating comes on.

There’s the space left on the Sky+ box, for instance, and whether only having 31% left is something to worry about.

Should you spend the next three days watching back-to-back episodes of Most Haunted, which you recorded on a whim just because you could, or should you hit the delete button and start over?

The hours between the last repeat of CSI on TV and the first rumble of the wheelie bin-emptying truck are perfect for musing over the great mysteries of life you don’t have time for during your hectic daily life.

After the third pillow re-plumping or duvet rearrangement hasn’t brought forth that delicious wave of comfort that comes before sleep takes over your mind, it is time to consider such big questions as who built Stonehenge, which horse I should put money on to win the Grand National and what happens if the Olympic Flame blows out during its journey to Beijing?

Unfortunately, the moment of epiphany always comes a split second before the drift into sleep and subsequent forgetfulness, dooming me to experience moments of genius only when there is nobody around (or awake) to witness them.

Some people keep a notepad within easy reach to record such revelations when they arrive in their consciousness, but as one of the things I ponder in the middle of the night is how to fit a bedside table on an impossibly narrow wall, I have nowhere to put such equipment.

It is possible that I have solved the thin-wall-table problem several times over – along with world peace, the location of Osama Bin Laden and how many Jelly Babies you can fit in a double-decker bus – yet just don’t remember it.

Such is the tragic burden of the insomniac savant.

I am not alone in my night- time musings, it turns out, as new research revealed this week that people think about all kinds of things to help them get to sleep.

The proverbial fence-jumping sheep have been handed their P45s and sent to be re-skilled in the Fosbury Flop in time for the London Olympics.

These days, we are more likely to count calories than woolly farm animals, the Travelodge survey found.

And when it’s not slices of Black Forest Gateau flying over dry stone walls, we start adding up our vast shoe and handbag collections, or relive goals scored by our favourite football teams.

Psychologist Corrine Sweet says we are straying from traditional cures for insomnia because: “Counting sheep, a simple rural mind game, obviously doesn’t do the trick in our over-stressed, complicated urban lives today.”

But obsessing about our materialistic passions and body image does?

It’s no wonder that two out of three Britons suffer from insomnia if they can’t enjoy a few hours in bed without mentally checking their to-do lists or fretting about complicated weight loss programmes.

In the interest of sanity, therefore, I am going to spend tonight’s inevitable sleepless hours wondering whether, if humans traditionally count sheep, what do sheep count when they’re suffering from a lack of shut-eye?

Do they imagine Ladies Day racegoers chasing each other around the course, damaging the turf with their Dior stilettos and knocking down competitors with each swing of their Chloe handbags?

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk