Christina Patterson: We're right to be obsessed with the bedroom

A few nights ago at a party, a former colleague and I fell into each other's arms. Well, OK, not literally each other's arms and I guess we didn't quite fall, because falling is what we're bad at. "How's it for you?" he said, blinking red-rimmed eyes. "Not great," I said. "And you?" "Terrible," he said. "Just terrible." And we both grinned in recognition and relief. Because we're both terrible, just terrible, at falling asleep.

On my bedside table is a CD by Paul McKenna called I Can Make You Sleep. "Would you like to sleep really well?" says the blurb on the back. "Would you like to stop your mind racing and feel calm? Would you like to awaken full of energy?" Yes, yes and yes, Paul, but why then can I recite your entire CD off by heart? Why can I give, in perfect estuary mid-Atlantic, with the intonation peculiar to the Enfield nerd turned supermodel-dating multimillionnaire, a little summary of all the latest developments in sleep research, including the fact that you should do nothing in bed except "make love" and sleep, and then recite (beautifully!) backwards all the numbers from 200 to 0, and give instructions on precisely which muscles to relax in which order and which deep breaths to take when? Why, then, can I do all this and still be awake?

If you prefer, I could recite "How to Get to Sleep Without Counting Sheep!", but the accent – lugubrious London loser – is so upsetting that I am transfixed by the man's misery. The antipodean ones are too chirpy. The American ones are too upbeat. Better, I find, are the custom-made ones: Gloria from that posh new age clinic in Soho, Rob the soothing-as-a-dentist hypnotherapist from Harley Street, Shaun the giant New Yorker from St John's Wood.

They were much better, those tapes specially made for me in sessions costing £75 a throw, sessions that would, surely, finally, lull me from the jangling horror of consciousness to that "balm of hurt minds, and "chief nourisher in life's feast", sleep. They were much better, except that they didn't work.

Nor did the lavender pillows or the aromatherapy sprays or the hot baths or the smuggled-in melatonin, or the skullcap tea or the lemon balm or the valerian or the Kalms. But then these are for lightweights. Nor did the cognitive therapy, or the teach-yourself-hypnosis books, or the temazepam, prescribed in doses that would knock out an elephant. The valium, bought in a chemist in Goa, and the little blue pills at Bangkok airport that had me dribbling all over my neighbour for the 13-hour flight back were both marvellous. But not the days that followed: the dragging around of limbs mysteriously encased in iron armour, the marshalling of thoughts that floated in soup. And the fog, my God, the fog. The fog was worse than the no-sleep fog, the fog that robs you of the names of household objects, and of friends and colleagues, the fog that robs you of the ability to form a sentence, an argument, a coherent thought, the fog that robs you of your sanity.

Dreams? Well, they would be lovely. "The finest entertainment known," according to Robert Graves, "and given rag-cheap." The stuff that feeds into poetry, and music, and art, the stuff that makes you more than an animal. But a functioning animal wouldn't be a bad start. An animal that didn't lose its doorkeys, or drop its mobile outside the front door and not notice, an animal that vaguely remembered what it had done the day before, and didn't carry round the accumulated weight of millennia of human suffering, millennia of human despair. An animal, indeed, that didn't spend an entire week in Cambodia, on dawn trips to temples, and watching the sun rise over Angkor Wat, surveying the beauty, and the history, and the horror, thinking only, obsessively, hungrily, murderously, of pillows, duvet, bed.

You don't need to tell me, as a new study did this week, that sleep is a way of getting rid of the previous day's mental rubbish, and weakening the links that build up between nerve endings. Mine are made of electric cable. Unlike the fruit flies in the study, they have been carrying the weight of a nation post Khmer Rouge, the collapse of the global economy, an entire Terracotta Army of looming deadlines and a War and Peace-length script of excruciating conversations. Trust me, I know about nerve endings. Trust me, I know about mental rubbish.

The world, as Nabokov once pointed out, is divided between those who sleep and those who don't. Those, he didn't say but might have, who see the bed at night as the gates to hell, and leave it in the morning as if, like Macbeth, from their mother's womb untimely ripp'd. Between those who note a secret glint in an eye across a room at a party and those who don't.

I don't know what will mend the broken economy, or redeem our sad world, but I know where our leaders – psyche, synapses and brain chemistry allowing – would do bloody well to start.

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