THE SLEEPER

When you are too tired to sleep, they say you must be overtired. Overtired - beyond tired proper, in a netherworld of whatever comes after tired. Imagine - too tired to sleep? How can this happen? I've often felt too tired for work, too tired to go out, too tired to stay awake... but too tired to sleep? How can this be?

What it boils down to, I think, is that everything in nature is cyclic. Nature likes cycles to keep everything ticking over, moving along, in its correct place. The Earth rotates in a cycle, you've got cycles for the tides and cycles for the seasons. Wherever you look in nature, there's something going through some kind of cycle. Nature gets to June it figures - hey, time to start that Summer thing again. Seven o'clock in the evening, Nature decides it's about time it started to get dark.

Sleep is another of those cycles. Sometimes you go to sleep the same as everyone else, then you wake up and it's three in the morning and your brain is racing. This is when the sleep cycle starts spinning too fast - you get thrown off and suddenly you're awake and sleep is rushing away from you. If you're lucky, your friends hold the fire exit open and you can jump right back in for the rest of the show. But if you don't catch it in the next two minutes, the sleep cycle whizzes out of reach and you've no chance of catching it again until the next showing at maybe 4.30. Then you can get your hand stamped and they let you back in.

You never hear of animals suffering with insomnia. Because, when an animal gets up in the middle of the night it's called nocturnal. Who's to say that they're not nocturnal at all - maybe they just have a lot on their mind? Those owls always look plenty twitchy, my friend.