It sometimes happens that, as soon as I decide to write about something, the universe sends me little pointers and reminders, as if to corroborate the idea. Call it serendipity or call it synchronicity; whenever an idea looks like having legs it will start to attract some kind of corroboration in the things I read or see or hear around and about me. No less a person than Goethe commented on this when he wrote that once one commits oneself throughly to a task, then Providence moves too: ‘All sorts of things occur to help one that would have never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings, and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.’

And if by chance Providence doesn’t move in my favour, I tend to forget about it, or rather, having committed myself to a certain kind of magical thinking, and not receiving any feedback from the universe (or Providence) I give up and choose another tack.

But 4.00 a.m. has proved a kind of anti-beacon, a proper misery magnet. Almost everyone has something to say about it; everyone, that is, who happens to be an insomniac. Because for insomniacs, 4.00 a.m. is Prime Time.

A quick scan of the literature supports this idea, and where better to begin than Marie Darrieussecq’s wonderful book, Sleepless, which I have mentioned before in these pages. In fact, a section of Sleepless is titled FOUR O’CLOCK OR WHATEVER TIME IN THE MORNING, which I have appropriated for this piece also.

The first insomniac on the guest list is Kafka, suffering ‘agonies in bed towards morning. Saw only solution in jumping out of the window’, swiftly followed by the ‘career insomniac’ Emil Cioran, whose notebooks contain similarly suicidal ideation: ‘Shocking night, At four in the morning I was more awake than in broad daylight. Thought about Celan. It must have been on a night like this when he suddenly decided to end it.’

Like a slow train chugging towards its unknown destination on a night of fog and rain, Marie Darrieussecq counts us down to zero hour: ’Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock. Insomnia without end.’

Marguerite Dumas, another elite member of the literary insomniac gang (and an alcoholic whose routine intake of vin rouge in her heyday was seven bottles per diem) adds her piece: ‘During serious bouts of insomnia, one says to oneself: “If I died this instant, what a relief that would be.”’ And the worst time, she writes, ‘is around three or four in the morning.’ Christian Oser, meanwhile, muses that ‘to die at four in the morning, in the discomfort of insomnia, constitutes a form of temptation, the hope of bailing out and coming to terms with silence.’ 

There is, writes MD, no end to this four in the morning literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald, another insomniac (and another drunk — many of the most illustrious insomniacs have also been addicts of some kind) puts in his tuppence worth: ‘What if this night prefigured the night after death . . . I am a ghost now as the clock chimes four.’

And as for music . . . in one of those instances of serendipity that I referred to at the start when the 4.00 a.m. idea was only a twinkle in my eye, someone played a recording of Mike Oldfield’s 1983 song Moonlight Shadow (performed by Maggie Reilly) which contains the tautology ‘Four a.m. in the morning’ (when else would it be?) . . .  except 4.00 a.m. isn’t exactly the morning, it’s more of an island in time, a non-place, but a place visited, or rather squatted, by innumerable insomniacs. And another musical reference is, of course, the opening of Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat: ‘It’s four in the morning, the end of December, I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better . . . ’, a song that accompanied me on my most tormented nights as an angst-struck teen.

In my novel The Blue Tent, the insomniac narrator is visited in his library at precisely a quarter to four by his mysterious house-guest, Alice. This specificity, I may as well confess, came about because at the time I was working on the story I was prone to waking at exactly 3.45 myself, and I wondered whether by turning it into fiction, it might stop happening (it did). Magical thinking in action.