Sleep

It’s 4 a.m. and my German shorthaired pointer, Percy, is lying on top of me. This isn’t a giant infraction on his part. Percy and I have long shared a bed. We start the early evening as we always do – me reading and he beside me at my invitation, the light on his side of the bed is on too, in case he wants to read as well; something German perhaps, like Thomas Mann. Later, when I decide to go to sleep, I turn out both of our lights and we glide off – his paw often in my hand – into the great unconscious. At some point during

One of my favourite dad jokes – and, since I became a father, I have many – is to respond to the question ‘How did you sleep?’ with ‘I lay horizontally in a darkened room with my eyes closed’. But it has never been that simple for me. All my life I have suffered from insomnia. Something that should be easy – newborn babies can just about manage it, after all – has become the hardest thing in my life. I’ve lost jobs because of it, and relationships: you feel like you are cut off from society. That’s one of the most annoying parts – most people’s response to the

‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.’ So said Freud in 1899 as the world was about to tip over into the dream obsessed twentieth century and its many decades of tortured introspection. For years, Freud has been roundly discredited. But it seems that, even if Freud remains unfashionable, his belief in the meaning of dreams is making a return, namely in the form of dream retreats and therapies marketed at our pandemic-addled subconscious. Whilst it was once formerly the duty of the long-suffering spouse to listen to last night’s dream – naked in an exam, driving down the