Eventually, I would have to concede that if I was feeling as though I was nothing but consciousness, then I probably was actually conscious. I would get up and make a cup of tea, bring it back to bed and read for a bit, to take my mind off all the existential questions that were washing around inside my skull. I would sit up in bed, the reading lamp on and a book on my lap while I stared ahead to stop myself from watching the digital alarm clock on my bedside table. I’m not given to that kind of introspection in daylight hours, only at night. As anyone who has experienced it will know, it is unhelpfully circular.

Round and round the minutes, then the hours would go, round and round … 4.30, 4.40, then 5.10, then only 5.13, then 5.55 – at last 6 a.m. arrived. I was obviously going to be awake the entire night but at least the entire night would come to an end at some point … Eventually I would relax, put down the mug and the book, tentatively, as if it was a risky thing to do, turn off the light, settle down beneath the duvet, the pillow plumped and squished beneath my head … and then … I would drift off into a world where thought was not possible, not conscious thought anyway. Images, yes, of the sort you get in dreams, pictures that didn’t make any sense, snippets of conversation – sometimes there wasn’t even that. Sometimes it was just the beautiful blackness of sleep: how blissful it felt, in the moments before it happened, to at last be at that point – as long as I didn’t think too hard about how I was going to fall asleep now and wake myself up again. Usually, as I finally fell, I felt nothing but perfect peace.

I was always in the deepest of sleeps when my alarm went off at 7 a.m. And waking myself up, rising from my bed, was every bit as hard as the reverse process had been a few hours earlier.

*

It was only a phase. At the time I met Matty, I hadn’t had insomnia for years, nor any absence seizures. I had been clear of my epilepsy diagnosis since the age of twenty-six and my NES blackouts were few and far between; the last one had been two years previously. I was well. I didn’t do much proper exercise but I walked everywhere and was on my feet all the time at work. I ate properly, had friends and hobbies. I was as good as I’d ever been, at the point in my life I met Matthew Goodison.

*