“Sleep is a fond childhood memory” is a line I somehow remember from the pilot episode of “St Elsewhere” by Mark Tinker, John Masius andJoshua Brand, back in the late 1980s, and it’s said by a doctor warning new interns how much their lives are going to change in their jobs. In both 1977 and 2017, the Doctor said “sleep is for tortoises” in “Doctor Who” and for some reason I remember that too.

I remember dialogue from years and decades ago, but then on Wednesday night, I forgot to set my alarm. I think it’s likely that this was the first time in very many years that I’d not then been woken by beeps or my watch tapping me on the wrist. And it turned out that waking up at 07:30 instead of being woken at 05:00 had absolutely no cataclysmic impact on my day. Maybe I chewed faster over breakfast, but I still shot a video, wrote a tricky book proposal, wrote news and features for something like seven hours, then spent two more producing a podcast, then attended some meetings into the evening.

The difference appears to be right now. As I write this to you, it’s a little after midnight, I am just into Friday and I don’t want to go to bed. I suppose I’m tired, but so much less so than usual. For the past couple of years in particular, I’ve tended to faint onto the bed instead of going to sleep.

Yet tonight I’m not thinking about alarms or the morning. I’m thinking about how I project the day onto the night. That made need explaining, if not to you then certainly to me.

Follow.

You’re not doing anything while you sleep. There are dreams and for a couple of decades I would have nightmares that seem to have mostly wandered away now, although I do want to tell you you of one where I kept dreaming a notification was popping up in the top right corner of my vision. And of when I dreamt a particularly scary nightmare, got up to the loo, came back to bed and immediately dreamt a kind of Making Of documentary about that previous nightmare.

Anyway.

Insomnia and dreams aside, when you go to bed you’re usually lying there, just being there, just being. Sleep doesn’t know or care that you’re happy or sad, glad or worried, you’re just asleep.

Yet I’ve usually seen sleep as the enemy. I’ve gone to bed angry at having wasted another day. Sometimes it’s a friend: I’ve instead gone to bed feeling relieved and that I’ve earned sleep.

And sometimes I’ve really gone to bed at night only in order to hide.

I don’t know where my mind is, maybe I’m more tired than I think. But all of this is in my head now and you just know that I’m going to sleep on it.