Bedtime Reading

“TWO OF HIS friends were sleeping on the floor and (while asleep and dreaming) he believed that the rotary blades of a helicopter were breaking off while they were spinning, and flying at him, so he was dodging and diving. And as the final one came at him, he swan-dived into what he thought was grass but was actually his two friends on their mattress. They were woken up at 4am by quite a large Alex landing on them saying, ‘Oh God, did you see that helicopter?’”

charity worker, is an amiable young man in his 20s. He has “sleepwalked” since childhood – although the word seems wholly inadequate to describe the baroque variety of his late-night antics. Some are funny but innocuous, like the time his flatmate woke to find Alex sitting at the end of his bed using a shoe as a telephone to order a pizza. And there was the