The simple secret to a good night’s sleep, according to Frances Whiting

The secret to one of mankind’s biggest mysteries may just have been unlocked - and it’s more simple than you think.

I have only recently discovered the beauty of something I’m sure many of you already know and practise. The night walk.

I recently became a night walker by accident, it was not a thought-out venture, but rather a fleeing from the heat, the humidity, the sometimes stifling four walls of hearth and home.

And so I took myself outside with my big hairy dog, Wilson, for protection (although truth be told the only sort of danger anyone would be in if they encountered Wilson would be death by a thousand licks).

Beneath a sliver of a moon. And when I did, I saw a landscape transformed, my neighbourhood changed into some kind of suburban Narnia, the streets cool and mysterious, bathed in shadow and light.

Frances Whiting reveals her secret to a good night’s sleep.

Dark patches spilled with gold from street lamps, every sort of green in the trees, strings of fairy lights in someone’s sprawling poinsettia. The air transformed too, crisper, sharper, full of scents. Late blooming, lemony moon flowers, white trumpets unfurling their secrets, cooking aromas from open kitchen windows and veranda barbecues. Sounds, too, in the absence of the jarring hum of traffic.

Audio bites from glimpses of life, footy on the television, laughter from a back deck, someone playing a piano (almost improbably and yet, unmistakably, snatches of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata). The less dulcet tones of intermittent barking of dogs as Wilson and I passed not-so-lucky canines in their yards, Wilson teasing them with his freedom, trotting beside their fences with a gait that said, “I am here and you are not.”

I walked well aware of my good fortune in feeling safe in my surrounds, and in the friendly faces of my fellow night walkers, whole tribes of them, I discovered. Solitary walkers, couples, the occasional family with kids running ahead, excited, released, in the dark.

Night walkers, I found, are friendly, more so than their daylight companions, probably because they are less hot, less encumbered, shaking off the day’s travails.

“Lovely evening,” a man said to me, his dachshund long and low at his legs.

“Lovely evening,” I echoed, invited and initiated by these words into the night tribe.

When I turned to head home, up a hill that seemed far easier to climb than it had that morning, I was transformed too. Lighter. Happier. Cooler. Calmer.

Frances Whiting reveals her surprising tip for how to get a better sleep. Picture: David Clark

I slept better that night than I had in many, and the next night I went out again, taking my husband, and the night after that, my teenage daughter. Both, at first, somewhat reluctant nocturnal nomads, both, on the journey home, converted. My daughter, in particular, entranced. “Everything looks more beautiful,” she said as we walked, hand-in-hand, a scattering of stars above us.

“I think that’s the Southern Cross,” I said pointing to four bright stars overhead (the fifth less visible).

“It looks like a kite,” my girl observed. Night walking, I also discovered, leads to night talking, conversations somehow easier without the unmasking glare of daylight. When we headed home, she said, “We should do this again”, and my husband said the same, and I intend to ask a friend or two if they would like to join me on an evening jaunt. And I hope, if you are so inclined, that you are also able to walk beneath a scattering of stars, in your very own moonlight sonata.

Originally published as The simple secret to a good night’s sleep, according to Frances Whiting