Do you ever wake up and you know before you even look at the clock what time it is? It might say 1.30 or 3 or quarter past 4, but you knew what it was going to be. In fact, you might even have mentioned it to someone and you weren't sure if they really believed you or not, but it didn't matter because you knew it was always the same time. Well, you might not be imagining that.Everyone wakes in the night, not once, but 10 times, 15, sometimes more. Everybody, every night, including the friend who tells you she sleeps through everything. Well, she wakes too.She just doesn't know about it because what matters isn't the waking, it's how deep you were when it happened. The first half of your night is heavy sleep, deep sleep. It's hard to pull anyone out of it, so awakening at midnight comes and goes and it never really reaches you.You're back under before you know anything's happened. The second half of the night is lighter. You're up near the surface and the exact same small waking that cost you nothing at midnight brings you all the way up at 3.30 and then you're properly awake and that's the only difference.It's not that you wake more, it's just that you're closer to the surface when those awakenings happen. So your friend who says she sleeps like a log, she wakes too at 3.30 but she probably just doesn't do anything about it. She turns over and goes back to sleep and by morning there's nothing to remember and that's where you and she are different.You wake and often there's that thought and usually it's the same one. You think, oh no, not again and then you look at the clock. It's right there and you want to know what time it is but knowing the time is no help at all.Either it's earlier than you hoped and there's a whole night of sleeplessness ahead of you or it's later than you thought and you've barely slept or it's your hour again and now you have more proof that you're doomed to always wake up at the same time and then usually the internal math starts. If you get to sleep now, how many hours and how many minutes of rest can you get until morning? And that's more than just a thought. That's a body being told that there's an emergency.Something alarming is happening. So your heart starts to a little faster and your blood pressure rises and your body shifts into alert mode and then whatever chance you had of sliding back under is gone and so you lie there awake and mad about being awake and you know our bodies, they're kind of amazing. They keep time beautifully, even sometimes when you're sleeping and if there have been many nights when you wake at a particular hour and then you stayed awake, your body has learned that that's the hour and it's decided to make it a habit and that's all this is.It's a habit and you can change it by turning your clock around. If it's on your phone then put it somewhere that you'd have to get out of bed to reach because knowing the time has never once helped you. It only ever tells you something you'd rather not know and you can't do the math if you don't have the numbers and stop trying so hard to get back to sleep.Effort wakes you up. Sleep isn't something that you can make happen. So let yourself simply lie there in the dark, awake, not sleeping, perfectly comfortable and that is usually when sleep comes for you.But before we start, please ensure that you are somewhere safe when listening, preferably your comfortable bed and not anywhere you need to stay alert. Let's get you settled. Find the perfect spot in your bed. Shift around until you find it. Take as long as you need. Nobody's timing this and when you get there, you'll know because you'll stop wanting to move.There's nothing else you need tonight and here's the thing about muscles. They stay switched on long after they've stopped being needed and all we're going to do is go through and tell each muscle that it's okay to switch off and let's start with your feet. Your feet have been gripping all day inside your shoes, on the floor, on the stairs.Let them know that they can stop and feel them relax. Feel them fall a little open the way feet do when nothing is holding them straight and now your calves are still half braced for standing up. You don't need to be so let them truly relax. Your knees, your thighs, they've been working since you got out of bed this morning. Tell them that they're done for the night and feel what happens when those muscles relax. Everything is unclenching.Your stomach, you can stop holding it in. Now your hands. Think about what your hands held today.A phone, a cup, a steering wheel. They've been closing around things since morning so let your fingers open across the tops of your shoulders now, in the back of your neck, where the muscles have spent all day holding your head up, in your jaw, in your eyes. Your eyes have been aiming at things all day, at screens, other faces, the road, and they can stop now.The only things still working are the ones that never stop. Your heart, your breathing, and neither of them needs you tonight. They've got it from here.In a moment I'm going to take you somewhere and all you have to do is listen to my voice. You don't need to think about the day. You don't need to think about tomorrow. The only thing you need to focus on is the sound of my voice. Just the sound of me talking. And if you drift off somewhere in the middle of it, that's good.That's where we're going. Just follow my voice. Imagine that it's earlier and you're getting ready for bed. You've brushed your teeth. The tap is off and the last light in the kitchen is off and you're standing in the hall in your robe doing that final check you always do. Everything as it should be. The house has done its settling for the evening and then from outside your front door you hear voices. A low sound of a lot of people talking at once. The way a crowd sounds when it's waiting for something and has been waiting a while.Somebody laughs. Trolley wheels squeaks past and then a voice over a speaker somewhere announcing something. The word stretched and softened so you can't catch a single one of them.It's the shape of a voice telling people where to stand. You take your hand off the light switch and then you feel it before you hear it. A shudder coming up from the floorboards into the soles of your feet and then you do hear it. A long way off and getting nearer. A deep working chuff of something enormous slowing itself down. Metal upon metal.A hiss. A whistle. Two notes.High and hollow. You open your front door and a wall of steam comes at you. Straight up over your slippers and past your face.Smelling of hot iron and rain on coal. And there's a train outside your house. Not.Down the road. Right there. Close enough to put your hand on it.And it is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen at 11 o'clock at night. It's a deep green. So polished you can see the street light reflecting on the curve of the boiler. Brass everywhere. And every bit of the brass has been polished by hand. There's a plate on the side with a name on it in swirling gold letters.Raised. Catching the light. The slumber line. And running off behind it into the dark. Further than you can see. The carriages.Every window is lit. Every blind pulled down. A long row of soft glowing squares going away from you.And behind each one somebody is already asleep. There's a strip of red carpet laid across your path. A man is standing at the bottom of the carriage steps with his hands behind his back.His uniform is the same deep green as the engine. Double breasted with two rows of brass buttons polished to a shine. His shoes are so well shined that you can see the carriage lights in his toes.And there's a cap under his arm and a watch chain looping across his front into a small pocket. His hair is gray and cut short and his eyes are bright blue with crinkles at the corners of them that only come from years of smiling. He nods his head about an inch and then he asks for your ticket.And you are on the point of telling him that there has been a mistake. That you don't have a ticket. And your hand goes into the pocket of your robe and it finds one.Your name across the front in dark ink. Each letter thick where the pen pressed and thin where it lifted. And underneath where the destination goes it just says deep and restful sleep.Nothing on the way will keep you from it. He punches it once with a small brass clipper. A neat metallic bite and hands it straight back to you.It's yours to keep. There's a case on the step beside you suddenly. A luggage label swinging off the handle with your name on it in the same ink.It's got everything you need for a night away. You don't have to open it to know that. And you don't have to carry it either because he's already picked it up. You straighten up a little taller and you pull the belt of your robe a little tighter and then you follow him aboard. The scent inside makes you smile. Something like buttered toast or vanilla and maybe violets. Carpet is thick and dark, patterned in plum and gold. The walls are wallpapered with a small repeating motif you have to lean in to make out. Mice, small sleeping mice, curled nose to tail, each one under its own little blanket, over and over, all the way down the corridor. Lamps are set into the wall between the doors, turned low, the light coming through pleated shades. A brass rail runs the whole length at hip height, sworn pale in all the places that hands go. The doors are dark wood, with brass numbers, nine, eleven, thirteen. Outside each one on the carpet sits a different pair of slippers, with the toes pointing at the door, and from behind the doors, nothing, at all, not silence, just the small sounds of people who have already settled, a cough, somewhere, the quietest snore, somebody turning over in a bed. He stops at your door and opens it, sets the case down inside and steps back into the corridor. He says goodnight, and he bows from the waist, and then the door closes and you're in. The room is small, and that's a good thing. Everything is within reach of the bed, and the walls are paneled and polished. The bed is turned down and waiting, the sheets are fine white cotton, folded back over the blanket, in a neat band the width of your hand, and the blanket is deep blue, the color of a midnight sky and thicker than any blanket you've ever put your hand on, and you get your hand under the edge of it and lift. It weighs, nothing, comes up in your fingers like air, and when you put it back down over yourself, you can't feel it on your chest at all. What you feel is that you've gone warm, as though the warmth was already in the blanket waiting for you, and every single person who's ever slept under this blanket has slept well. And over that, folded at the foot, an eiderdown in plum-colored silk, quilted in squares, light as nothing, and warm as a summer afternoon. Two pillows, one firm and one soft, so that you can decide, and under the covers at the bottom, over to one side, exactly where your feet are going to go, a hot water bottle in a knitted cover. There's a little table under the window with brass rings set into the wood, and standing in the rings, a cut crystal carap of iced water and a glass to match. Beside it, a small vase with one white flower. The window has a blind that you can let down, and the plum curtains draw across in front of it and behind them, just the darkness. You hang your robe on a brass hook fixed to the paneling, and you turn the little light switch, and the room goes dark, except for a thin line of light under the door, which isn't enough light to bother anyone. And the train begins to move, and the lights of your own street slide backwards past the edge of the blind and away. In bed, the rhythm of the train comes up through the mattress more than the air. It rocks and settles, your body gently moving with it. The wheels find their pattern, two beeps and a pause, over and over again, and somewhere out of sight, the heater ticks once and stops. There is nothing to do, no way of making tonight go faster or slower than it's already going. Somebody else is driving, someone who has done this run 10,000 times in the dark. You're being carried, and tonight, you're going to sleep the way you slept when you were seven years old, the whole night, all of it, deep and heavy and easy, the way sleep is supposed to be, and the way you'd more or less stopped believing it could be. You'll be asleep inside of a few minutes, and you'll go a long way down into the good, dark end of sleep, where the body does its repairs and nothing reaches you at all. Your breathing will slow down, and the warmth will build up under the blanket, and you're going to dream. Nothing you'll be able to describe in the morning, a place you seem to know, somebody's voice, being happy about something, a color, a kind of light, a feeling of being somewhere you were glad to be. It'll be gone before you've opened your eyes, but there will be a few seconds tomorrow, sitting on the edge of the bed with your feet on the floor, when you notice that you're smiling, and you have no idea why. And because you are a human being, and this is how sleep works, you'll wake a few times in the night, everyone does, 10 times, 12, maybe more, brief risings between the deeper stretches, and almost none of them will be remembered. It's just how sleep works, and it always has, but what will be different is what happens next, because normally, this is where it starts. Normally, there's that tension when you see the hour, and it's the same hour it always is. Normally, you would lie there and start working out how much time is left, and what tomorrow is going to be like. And whether this is always going to happen. But tonight, your hand doesn't move to check the time, because it's warm where it is. What comes instead is a sort of pleasant not caring, a soft indifference to waking, the feeling of being far too comfortable to be bothered. Everyone on this train is doing exactly the same thing, all up and down in those dark compartments. People are waking for a moment, and going back to sleep again. And by morning, not one of them will remember it happened. So the hour is just the hour, it isn't a pattern, it doesn't get to mean anything at all. And you are not going to make anything of it. Instead, you'll turn over, and press your cheek into the cool side of the pillow, and let your mind go wherever it wants to go. And the train will go on, through the night, out across country that you'll never see, through small stations with nobody standing on them, through long dark stretches with nothing at all. Warm, and lit, and quiet. The driver knows where you're going. It's nothing that you need to worry about, not the route, the timing, or the dark. Sleep was never meant to be one unbroken block. It's a run of stretches with brief risings in between, and the risings are part of the design. You don't have to stay under to be resting. You don't have to do it perfectly. You only have to let it carry you. And it will, all night, whether you're aware of it or not. Morning is still a way off, and somewhere in the next hour, the sound underneath, the rumble of the train, the wheels on the track, that sound starts turning into something else. The small sound of your own home in the deep of the night, the car going past outside, the fridge starting up, running a while, and stopping. All the small noises your own home makes at night, when there's no one listening to them. Or in your own bed now, when you've been here for a while, your own pillow under your cheek, your own weight, pressing down into your own mattress, the shape of your own room around you in the dark, in that hour. The one that used to come and find you every night, it went past. Somewhere back there, it doesn't have any hold on you at all. If you surface again before morning, that's all it needs to be, a brief moment in the night. You don't have to check the time. You don't have to work anything out. You're bad. It's warm, and it's yours, and sleep is right here.