Insomniacs: Radio 4 Extra

I think I'm annoying some people with my medical one-upmanship so let me make it plain that I do not claim to be an insomniac. If you add up all my naps I get way more than my share .

It's just that my schedule has gone all to cock. Even before all this, my schedule was never that tight.

Now there is no night and day, no weekends, no dates, no structure. All I have is the next hour or so and I decide what to do with it.
I can choose from

• sleep
• watch telly
• something useful
• eat
• medicate
• sit in kitchen with a slack jaw
• dress up like a polar bear and go the shops

It's kind of nice really. Flexi.

I do know that proper insomnia is hell and this is why I'm here to tell you about BBC Radio 4 Extra.

This is a digital radio station that plays spoken word programmes. Comedy, plays, series, books, documentaries, opinions and interviews. Stuff from the whole history of radio.

There is never any news or suggestion that the real world exists. They hardly ever even tell you the time. Programmes occur randomly with no sense of appropriateness to the time of day. Everything comes on twice with a random period between repeats. Due to an anomaly in the probability matrix, if you hear just two programmes in a day, you hear the same programme twice. 

This lack of reference to the real world gives Radio 4x a creepy but interesting atmosphere. It's like listening to transmissions from another planet.

A while ago, I heard an old US radio play in which Humphrey Bogart played a man who had killed someone and was trying to avoid arrest. (I don't know how he killed them, I missed the beginning). He reads in the paper that the death is being treated as accidental. The twist is that he can't handle the guilt and fesses up anyway. 

Weeks later I am still tormented by anxiety from this play. I see Humph in his stolen white clothes bumming a lift out of town with a truck driver. Plot-wise, everything has been resolved now, but still it torments. Maybe because there is no picture as persistent as the one you make up in your head. 

Listening in bed at 3am, the radio winds in and out of dreams in a way that seems plausible, though on analysis, it isn't. I was listening to a thing about snow, and believed I was drinking in every word, with a comfy feeling that at last I was really beginning to understand snow. Then a joke from a sitcom called "Cabin Pressure" comes in, and it all seems fine. 

I think morphine might help a bit with all this dream/reality merging, so your experience might be different. I urge you not to take morphine recreationally however. We don't want a rerun of Trainspotting all over Caversham, now do we?