I am exhausted today after a night of broken sleep and nightmares. Everyone has their fears don’t they? Sometimes they pop up and won’t be made to lie down again for a while. Last night was full of those demons for me.

Everything seemed perfectly normal and I fell to sleep just fine. The next thing I knew was that I was conscious of a sound outside our bedroom door. My initial reaction was to reach across for DM but all I found was an empty, cold space where his warm body should have been. I realised two things, firstly that it was him on the landing and secondly that he’d obviously been gone for some time because the bed was stone cold.

He came back into the room at that point and when I asked what was up, he said that insomnia had been brought on by his cold that was keeping him sniffling and the combination of the two things had made him decide to get up and ‘reset’ his body clock. He’d been into his office, processed and loaded his photo for yesterday while I slept on, blissfully unaware that he wasn’t beside me.

Realising he’d been gone brought my demons to life. I very rarely get troubled by night-time work demons, even though I worry about my job in my conscious thought all of the time. I rarely find my fears of ‘never being quite good enough to meet the expectations of my company of me’ and ‘never being quite supportive enough of the rest of the team’ interfering in my sleeping patterns. Those fears get me in daylight hours!

What gets me in the night is the fear of losing the one thing that I hold dear above all else. David. Why does this spook me so much in the night? Well I suspect that it is partly the intimacy we share in the night but it’s more than that.

In my ‘previous life’ my husband being missing from our bed usually meant something much, much worse. It usually meant I was being betrayed. In those days, my terror of the night was as palpable as if there was a real demon in the room with me. There were many, many occasions when I would wake screaming when the bedroom door opened at 3 or 4am. It wasn’t a physical thing – I wasn’t being beaten, it was waking to the complete and certain knowledge of that unfaithfulness.

Now, however much my logical, rational, consciousness tells me that I need have no fears in this regard, when those demons come in the night I can’t shake them off. My mind thinks it's all starting again, that I haven't been good enough or nice enough or sexy enough to stop it from coming back to me. My mind tells me that I can never hope to keep such a man. My mind tells me that my worst fears are being realised. He, of course, doesn't deserve for my mind to play such terrible tricks. He doesn't deserve my subconscious doubts. When I realised he’d been gone and been at his PC for some time, my emotional, irrational side took over and produced for me ghoulish, fragmented, terrifying dreams with periods of wakefulness for the rest of the night. Even though he slipped into bed and spooned me for warmth and comfort, his proximity and reassurance couldn’t chase away the fear.

So today I have felt like a zombie all day, like the un-dead that I was five years ago and for many years before that.