Insomnia - it kills your dreams. Literallly.

Captain James T Kirk got it wrong you know.

He said that space was the final frontier, the place to “explore strange new worlds, seek out new life forms and new civilisations and to boldly go where no man has gone before” .

But it isn’t intergalactic space travel that you need to achieve all these goals, it is something far more humble – a solid night’s dream-laden sleep. No sci-fi writer in the world has yet managed to come up with story lines to match what your mind can produce when the imagination is set free during your sleeping hours.

You do indeed boldly go to places where you have never been and face scenarios you can never imagine.

It’s a mystical, magical world.

Sadly, however, for many people like me this dream world is often ruined by the appearance of a Klingon. And he’s called insomnia.

I have written about my occasional bursts of insomnia a couple of times in this blog/column over the years and it always produces letters or comments later because so many people suffer from this demoralising night time problem. A survey in America in 2002 said that as many as 58 per cent of adults in America experience symptoms of insomnia a few nights a week or more. That seems rather a high figure to me but anecdotally I know that a lot of people are just not getting as much sleep as they would like.

My insomnia – which I understand is called transient insomnia – is like a strange uncle who turns up unexpectedly at a do. He stays as long as he sees fit and then just goes. You don’t know why he decided to come but you suspect after he leaves that he will pop back again when you least expect it. He’s not your favourite uncle.

I’ve had a couple of bouts lately – the most recent on Tuesday night. I had no particular issues on my mind, no reasons to stop me going into dream land but not only did I not have 40 winks but I think I hardly had a single (tiddly) wink. People say that is impossible and you must sleep sometime but all I can say is that my digital clock and I became very well acquainted and if there were bursts of sleep, the clock must have stopped while I had them.

I tried all my usual methods to help me sleep – but to no avail. One I would heartily recommend to other sufferers which usually does the trick is to look at the time and if it is, say 11.15pm, then remember what you were doing at every quarter past the hour throughout the day. Normally I am asleep before I get to lunchtime. On Tuesday though even this fail-safe system, err, failed.

The problem with insomnia is that even as and when you get through the night you then carry it over to the following day. On Wednesday morning, as I write this, I still feel alert and ready for action (ish) but I won’t get home tonight until about 11pm because I’m chairing an election debate at St Martin’s Church. To anyone who was there can I, therefore, just say that if I did fall asleep, it was nothing to do with the politicians. Honest.

So to all those who are reading this who are fellow sufferers, you have my total sympathy. I just hope that tonight you can boldly go into your lovely dreamland and leave the Klingon well behind.

Did they 'lie me to the moon' all those years ago?

What is your earliest childhood memory?

Some people can answer this question instantly and often seem to recall in great detail staring up out of a pram or, in one case that I read, being in their mother’s womb.

I call these people fantasists.

For me, sadly, my earliest memories are only around the age of 5 or 6.

The first was being chosen to be one of the three kings at my school’s Nativity and wondering, in my own infantile way, why the baby Jesus wanted this thing I gave him called ‘Frankincense’ (pictured here) when I was sure he would have preferred toys.

I can also recall saying to my fellow two kings (Nigel Postings and Lawrence Green) that we would one day live in a house together – as you do at that age. I barely ever spoke to ‘King One’ Lawrence again but Nigel went on to be best man at my wedding, so our early Royal connections clearly worked.

Anyway . . . my second earliest memory is being got up out of bed by my parents to watch the first moon landing – the 40th anniversary of which we are celebrating this week.

For somebody with a vivid imagination, this was a source of great wonderment to me. I remember for years afterwards thinking how on earth could a man walk on that little ball in the sky when to me a trip into town on the bus was an epic journey.

Of course, as childhood wide-eyed innocence gives way to latter-day cynicism, I then went through my “it was all a giant hoax phase”. Now I’m not a great believer in conspiracy theories, be they about Princess Diana, JFK or even Michael Jackson (although I did say even at the time that it wasn’t MJ at that O2 press conference pictured left) but the more I tentatively investigated the moon landings the more I started to have my doubts.

Fuelled no doubt by that highly watchable 1978 movie Capricorn One about a faked trip to Mars, I started to wonder whether the whole thing was just a political stunt to get one over on the Russians during the height of the Cold War.

I quoted the evidence about the flag not moving, the mystery of the shadows and the fact that the ‘moon rock’ was apparently identical to material found in Antarctica, to query the whole mission. And it seems I’m not alone – this is a ‘biggie’ in the hoax/conspiracy movement.

Well, I’m pleased to say, that my doubting Thomas phase is now over. Although science and scientific discovery is not usually high on my agenda of interest, I’ve watched a number of TV programmes about the moon landings of late and experienced much of the wide-eyed naivety I felt as that five year old.

Yes, I could still argue with some conviction that $30 billion would have been far, far better spent on ending world poverty but the truth is, I think we as a planet should have oodles of pride in this amazing achievement. Will it ever be repeated? Will man ever walk again on the surface of the moon? Maybe not – but at least we can say “been there, done that” about it.

One final point about the whole expedition was raised by the splendid Nicky Campbell who I wake up to every morning on my beloved Radio Five Live. He said he remembered as a child watching the moon landing pictures and being disappointed by the ‘photo quality’. He thought Star Trek did interplanetary exploration films much better than the real thing!

This actually got me thinking the opposite. After I’d heard him talk I pondered on just how incredible it is that we managed to get pictures from the moon at all. After all shouldn’t we impressed (or depressed?) that we managed to get live moon pics and yet half of Bath can’t even pick up Channel Five or Freeview?