Eyes wired open

I have a fractious relationship with the dark hours; we fall in and out of love.

I have a fractious relationship with the dark hours; we fall in and out of love.

Once, pre children, I loved the velvety quiet of night time, when I'd gallop the writing surrounded by a slumbering neighbourhood, fuelled by chocolate and champagne. Neurophysiologically, we have a creativity and an energy peak between two and four in the mornings. Sylvia Plath wrote in the early hours before her kids were awake. Her writing has that sharpness and tautness and hysteria of 4am; and look what happened to her.

As for me, now, cripes - harangued by wakefulness at 3am. The baby is finally sleeping overnight yet I'm haunted, still, by the imprint of his feeding times. With frustrating regularity my mind jolts from slumber like a steel trap sprung open. Thoughts are freed, pinging and zipping. Writing lines to be jotted down; emails checked from my old world, London; battle plans drawn up to tackle the child-crammed day ahead; ridiculously small worries that torment with sudden, obscene enormity - only to fade into insignificance in the light of a new day. The result: a life, right now, held hostage by sleep. The lack of it, the craving for it, the conspiring to get it. It feels like a very modern scourge, this inability to switch off.

US blogger Arianna Huffington passed out from exhaustion, broke her cheekbone and got five stitches over her eye. Since then she's declared lack of sleep "a feminist issue" and wants women to achieve at least seven straight hours of slumber a night. I wish ...

Girlfriends talk about a lie-in with a passion and urgency that's absent from talk about sex; we dream of Shakespeare's "sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care". We're in love with it: wondering why we can't get enough of it, feeling guilty when we do. Feminism's given us the right to expect relationships, career and children all at once but it's also given us a new level of exhaustion. One girlfriend told me her husband had fallen asleep inside her while making love. "He was exhausted from work - and I was relieved, because I was exhausted, too. I just rolled him off and went to sleep. It's all we want now."

I know a high-powered career woman who existed on four hours a night. She could never sleep with a man beside her; because of the trust in it, the relaxing. She was very tight and controlled, had never had an orgasm, had never worked out how to let go; she'd surrounded herself with a boundary of no.

At 38 she fell in love with a man who slept with the abandon of a child, limbs splayed. He taught her to relax. Gave her her first orgasm. And for the first time in her life she slept soundly by a man and discovered the sweetness of an arm winging her torso in slumber, the arch of his foot locked into her calf, and waking together into the cleanness of a new day.

I find shared sleep deeply sexy; often more so than making love. It's where true love lies, beyond words, beyond sex. "Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)," the Czech author Milan Kundera wrote.

The problem for the chap and I is that with all our young kids it's a constant round of musical beds in our house, so the two of us rarely end up in the same bed. We can't wait to climb beyond these fractured early years of parenting. Saying that, few things are sweeter than a child falling into the heaviness of slumber in your arms. At night I breathe in deep their sleeping, my heart welling with love - and envy. Oh for the vastness of that safe, secure, replenishing oblivion. I yearn for the gift of it, unbroken, for 12 hours straight. "Balm of hurt minds ... chief nourisher in life's feast." Shakespeare, again, of course.

Nikki Gemmell's book With My Body is out now