The amount of time spent asleep didn’t really matter. He had decided that the key to it all—the one thing that determined whether the nap would actually refresh him—was the breaking of the thread of consciousness: that moment when he ceased to think in a coherent, sequential, self-aware way and went adrift. Often, this was connected with a jolt of an arm or a leg as he stepped over the threshold from conscious thinking into a dream where he was obliged to reach out and catch a ball or open a door or something. If the jolt didn’t wake him up, then it meant he had snipped the thread of consciousness and that the nap had thereby achieved its only real purpose. Even if he woke up ten seconds later, he would be as refreshed—possibly more so—as if he’d slumbered deeply for an hour.

He had studied the jolt. On those increasingly rare occasions when he slept with a woman, he would sometimes will himself to stay awake as she fell into slumber, listening to her breathing and feeling her body go soft against his until, just at the moment when she drifted away, she would convulsively move a limb.

His business activities (he was the founder and chairman of a large video game company) sometimes involved flying in a private jet to the Isle of Man, eight time zones away, where a longtime business associate—an independently wealthy writer—dwelled in a renovated castle. The writer would put him up in a bedchamber in one of the towers: a round room decorated with medieval bric-a-brac and warmed by burning wood in a fireplace built into the wall. The bed was a four-poster with a heavy canopy. A couple of years ago, after climbing into that bed and lying there sleepless for a while, Richard—for that was Dodge’s real name—had finally drifted off and fallen into a nightmare involving a very dangerous and unpleasant character he had tangled with some years earlier. He had awakened to the hallucinatory awareness that this man was standing next to his bed looking down at him. Which was impossible, since the man was dead—but Richard had been in a half-dreaming state where logic did not hold sway, and all he knew was what he saw. He tried to sit up. Nothing happened. He tried to raise his arms. They did not move even the tiniest amount. He tried to draw breath and scream, but his body did not respond to the command from his brain. He was perfectly helpless, lacking even a bound captive’s power to struggle against his bonds. All he could do was experience the terror of it, and the horror of his complete lack of agency, until somehow he drowsed off again.