Eva Bradley: Whisper sweet words of soporific wisdom

Eva Bradley

INSOMNIA is a cruel bed partner and one whose horrors can only truly be understood by those who've laid with the beast for an extended length of time.

And time, as you quickly discover at 2am or thereabouts, is as elastic as a warm wedge of mozzarella, stretching out to impossible lengths without any sign of breaking. Now and again I've suffered from insomnia but never in the way I do when I'm pregnant.

Although it doesn't help that five strategically placed pillows are required to get even remotely comfortable, and I often wake up on my back like a beached whale feeling like all of my organs have been crushed, there's something about my condition that makes it impossible to switch my brain off.

Overwhelmed with tiredness when I can't be in my bed, it seems the moment I am, my brain decides to whirr though every minor worry with a major analysis.

Fortunately, there are as many solutions to this problem as there are problems to keep one awake in the first place. Unfortunately, I feel like I've tried them all.

That is until a couple of weeks ago when I decided to give a friend's technique of falling asleep to the drone of the BBC World Service a crack.

Except there was something about falling unconscious to a newsreader working through a litany of the world's woes that didn't sit right with me, and so I downloaded an audiobook instead.

I've bought lots of self-help books in my time that I am convinced hold the secret to transforming my life, were I only to read them.

Unfortunately, thanks to the punishingly heavy reading lists endured during a degree in English literature and history, I have developed an aversion to reading for anything other than mind-numbing pleasure.

My Kindle hides an embarrassingly lowbrow collection of chick lit and detective thrillers while my bookshelf boasts far more erudite hard copies of higher learning, all of which remain unread. But what if I could absorb all of the content with none of the effort?

An audiobook seemed like the solution to this. Even if it weren't, the content would surely be either boring enough to send me to my sought-after slumber or compelling enough to prevent the mindless ephemera I found myself contemplating after lights out.

Unlike most of the eccentric and usually ineffective solutions offered to solve the plethora of pregnancy-related ailments all women suffer, this idea actually worked.

For the past fortnight I have been drifting off easily to words of wisdom from some of the world's brightest minds from the past 100 years.

I've had Stephen Covey, Napoleon Hill and Daniel J Siegel all on loop telling me over and over and over again how to be a better, smarter, richer, wiser and nicer human, parent, child, business owner and neighbour.

All of this while I've been unconscious.

Often I'll wake up with my earphones painfully embedded in my ears and discover the contents of an entire book of wisdom has been whispered while I've slept. Books that have sat on my shelf ignored for years have been consumed aurally overnight.

Forget the fact I'm finally sleeping, I'm about to morph into a gawd-damned genius, right?

¦Eva Bradley is a columnist and photographer.