I commemorate the big days – the birthday, the wedding anniversary, the D-Day – but I tend not to count the months. That way madness lies.

Having said that though, I notice as I type this that is has been exactly 30 months to the day I lost Gail. That’s significant. I understand a lack of sleep in the first year or so of grieving; I know how the mind races looking for answers to questions it can’t possibly find the answer to. But 30 months? Surely, in that time one or two decent nights sleep are not too much to ask for?

I’ve discussed this before (Sweet Dreams) but things seem to have gotten worse rather than better and I’m not seeing any real end to it. Lack of sleep, disquieting dreams, night sweats and awful, nerve shredding nightmares are one of the worst side-effects of grief. I know from speaking to others in a similar situation that they all suffer from them and all find them upsetting and bewildering but I rarely see anything written about it. I wonder why that is? The lack of acknowledgment is fascinating considering the surfeit of advice and self-help I’ve received for every other aspect of dealing with my life post-Gail.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, there’s a lot of well-intentioned nonsense to be had from others trying to console and encourage you as you attempt to recover from losing a loved one, in fact only today I was told I was ‘doing grand’ by someone I’ve not seen in two years. Depending on my mood, it can be very funny or faintly annoying; on a bad day it can induce Grief Tourette’s, but the only advice I’ve ever had on bad nightmares is ‘they can’t hurt you’. And there lies the rub.

Because for all the exercise, contemplation, meeting people, spending time on my own, going out, staying in, yoga, transcendental meditation – insert as applicable – that has been suggested for my wellbeing, nobody – and particularly me – has any advice on what I can instruct my head to do when I go to sleep. And, oh my God, it does some strange and terrible things.

One thing I think it’s vital to point out is that it never lets me dream about Gail as I knew her. Good or bad she is simply not there like that. This seems awfully cruel. After all, we’ve penning sonnets and writing love songs for centuries in which the protagonist gets to dream about his or her loved one. Poor Roy Orbison – and there was a man who had more than his share of tragedy – made a whole career out of dreamin’. I dream about Gail but never of her, she’s always on the periphery somewhere, usually somewhere I can’t get to her and I’m searching for her or just full of the knowledge that she’s unobtainable.

For many nights I searched a theatre that I knew she was in, going up and down aisles seeing if I could see her. Often I’d return to an aisle where I thought I’d glimpsed her only to find it was blocked off. I’d awake from these dreams, stressed and anxious and deeply disturbed. They would impinge on my day and be difficult to shake and yet, of course, they couldn’t harm me, they were just my brain’s way of dealing with a situation. So what can I do to make my brain have ‘nice thoughts’ and give me a decent night’s rest? Well, there seems to a marked lack of advice on what I can do about that!

Strangely, the theatre dream disappeared after I told someone about it and I did briefly contemplate ringing someone randomly every day to tell them of last night’s dream in the hope it would expunge it from brain once uttered but figured what few friends I had might disappear altogether if I carried on like that. My current dreams often involve Gail’s ex-husband – a man I’d never met and not considered for one moment in 30 years (I knew her before him and she left him for me – long story! – so it’s not as if I’ve any axe to grind). They make no sense and I genuinely don’t believe I have or had any deep-rooted issue with the man; rather I think my brain is trying to tell me something or get something out but I can’t figure out what it is.

Just two months after Gail passed I bought a new bed. I couldn’t bear to sleep any longer in something that she’d been in and would never be in again, so I decided to make a wholesale change and sell the divan base as well as the mattress and just get new. I thought I researched it well at the time but I’ve began wondering if I was just so desperate to make a change that I made the wrong choice so, even though it’s less than two years since I bought the new bed I decided I needed to make more changes.

So yes, the big news is I have something new in my life now; something that is supposed to make my life better. I’m just getting used to it but the cats seem to have already decided and they are perfectly happy with the change. Allow me to introduce you to Emma. Emma Mattress. I’ll let you know if this is a match that is going to last.