I'm still an avid watcher of cloud shapes. Just before dawn I saw exactly one cloud and an afterthought of a cloud. The cloud was a corpse as laid out on a mortuary slab (not specific at all); the fragment was a wispy triangle. The cloud morphed into the ghost of a dress I once had; the good-for-nothing triangle disappeared. From dress to fins to an almost poster-perfect sketch of Maleficent.

I had slept not at all. My sleep is ragged at the best of times, but that night and into the cloudy morning, there was none of even the shabbiest kind. I was sleep naked. And still awake enough to recognise it. I spent so much of my life not being good at sleeping that even when I succeed I still identify as an insomniac. I can recall exactly one morning in my life when I woke from a good night's sleep. As I got out of bed I knew something was strange. Bewildering, even. 'This is what people mean when they say they slept well,' I heard myself think. I know I've had many good sleeps but I never registered them as such. And it hasn't happened again. So, yes, cloud shapes get really intense when you have not slept in 46 hours. Contemplating getting into a car is even more interesting.

Mine is a rather under-slept family. When I was in my teens it was not uncommon for me to make my way to the kitchen at three in the morning and find it alive with other foraging non-sleepers. Some got better, some got worse. I've been both. It's terrible. It's bad when I can't sleep, but I wonder if it's worse when I can. When I can sleep I live with a sort of low hum of fear that the long nights of painful restlessness will come looking for me. There was one saving grace in the early years: I understood it to some extent. Far too often people suffer through insomnia without a clue as to what they did to deserve it. Was it stress? A side-effect of medication? A Greek curse? I was lucky, I had a simple answer: I was afraid to fall asleep because if I did then I'd likely wake up. And waking up meant facing a new day.

My depression was enjoying one of its self-satisfied wins. Nothing felt right. My skin didn't fit. Everyone despised me. I was no good at anything. The rain refused to fall. Nothing was off limits. Whatever it was I could blame my depression. The unrelieved bleakness was all there was room for. When you know that's what you're waking up to, waking up doesn't sound too attractive. It's as irrational as it sounds but that didn't stop me from trying to outrun the dread of simply being. It's also when I realised I was a vampire. The dawn was not to be endured. No matter how little sleep I'd been granted, as soon as I felt the morning coming on, I'd bury myself under pillows and blankets.

Now, in the now-time, things are different. Not only have I been on a good roll (apart from the recent incident) but I've started to understand something both old and new. We've long established that I'm no ray of sunshine, but truly, when I say the thoughts get dark, I can't begin to describe them. I mean that literally; I don't think it would be