I’ve been enjoying unusually good sleep in these days of filming, I think because of the feeling of bringing out all sorts of things and connecting them and putting them on record before I am deprived of my mind by... by some catastrophe. It’s a very satisfying feeling, and has allowed me good sleep, but... but last night it didn’t work, and I had a nightmare and I woke up. I don’t have tricks for falling asleep, like counting sheep; I think counting sheep would keep me awake, but when I read lying in bed at night, there comes a point when I’m either forgetting… losing the thread of the argument or forgetting sentences, or interpolating sentences and scenes of my own. A particular one stays in my mind, although it was 30 years ago when I was working on sign language on my own book, Seeing Voices, and I was reading Gibbons’ autobiography, and at one point he gives a fabulous description of seeing people signing, and seeing sign language in the streets of London around 1770. I thought, gosh, that’s beautiful, must use it as a footnote in the book. But when I looked again it wasn’t there. I had invented it or dreamed it.

There is a brief period when I am dreaming for a moment, or having hallucinations, hypnagogic hallucinations for a moment, or possibly getting, you know, what are sometimes called REM intrusions, dream intrusions, and at that point the doors of sleep, the portal of sleep, is wide open. It only lasts about 15 seconds, at that point I must stop reading, stop everything, and I will fall asleep instantly. If I miss it, if I feel I need to go on to the end of a paragraph, I may not have another opening for... for two hours. It’s a very, very delicate thing. I don’t know whether this is common or not, but anyhow, that’s a little thing.