Reading against insomnia

Are you awake a lot at night? Do you toss and turn, finally switching on the light because reading a few more pages might trick you back to sleep? It’s always baffling to me, how things you’d hardly ever think about at daytime turn into distorted, monstrous shadows in the night, only to disappear again, almost without a trace, by morning.  

Like many insomniacs, I read a lot when that happens. But my other secret weapon against the midnight gremlins is my ‘Midnight Book’.

During the day, I do the regimented, tick-off-the-list kind of writing. Every morning, I sit down at my desk, wait for the neighbour’s cat to lope across the balcony and settle in the sunny spot outside my window, before I start wrestling with my lovely (although currently just the teeniest bit stroppy) Book 3. 

Writing your way through restless nights

My Midnight Book, however, has nothing to do with Book 3, and it’s the very opposite of regimented or structured. It’s a loose and dreamy mind-world, filled with all my favourite things: June and October, leafy London streets, girls inheriting teashops and baking cakes, clearing out their attics and finding treasure, discovering secrets and long-lost relatives. Friendships blossom and sisters squabble, romance springs up, families reunite. 

It could fill hundreds and hundreds of pages if I were to ever write it all down. But the very magic of it is that it doesn’t need to be captured on paper, be pressed into a structure, have a beginning, middle and end. Instead, it waits for me inside my head, a wonderful world between dream and imagination, to keep me company when the nights seem too endless to fathom.