I have suffered from insomnia since I was a kid.

I used to joke that my memoir should be titled, “Enemy of Sleep.”

However, I have been making this joke for so long without having produced a memoir that I really should change the book’s name to, “Enemy of Writing a Memoir.”

Yes, I am a worrier, but worrying for no good reason in the middle of the night does not seem to be the root cause of my insomnia.

I will have you know that there were times in my life when I had perfectly reasonable reasons for worrying in the middle of the night, although a Buddhist might remind me that there is never a good reason to worry.

Fear that a Buddhist will wake me up out of a sound sleep to remind me not to worry has kept me up all night, sick with worry.

Yes, I have tried medicine for insomnia. I won’t share its name but it’s the one that has a certain side effect that involves waking up naked on the courthouse steps holding a bucket of cold chicken and wearing a sombrero.

Since I am liable to wake up naked on the courthouse steps holding a bucket of cold chicken and wearing a sombrero even when I am not taking this unnamed medicine, I wasn’t too concerned about this side effect.

The real problem with the drug is that it puts you to sleep but doesn’t give you good sleep.

Then, of course, there is a popular hormone and dietary supplement that now comes in 20 flavors and a dozen textures.

Whatever your favorite candy was as a child, you can get a version of this hormone that mimics it, even (I suspect) orange circus peanuts.

But ingesting that hormone left me feeling in the morning like the sort of sloth who is teased by the other sloths for being too lethargic.

Eventually, I developed a mental exercise so original that it has baffled scientists for years, mainly because I am really bad at describing it and also because the people to whom I described it turned out not to be scientists.

They turned out to be masochists. They enjoyed how bad I was at describing my mental exercise. A little too much, if you ask me.

The state between being asleep and being awake is called hypnagogia (I literally just learned) and what I discovered is a way to trigger a hypnagogic state without being sleepy.

I joke about a lot of things, but I am not joking about that.

Even though I have devised my own personal and heretofore unexplainable cure for insomnia that works at least 80 percent of the time, I also decided to make peace with my particular variant of insomnia.

Many years ago, a friend sent me an article about the medieval phenomenon of two sleeps.

Apparently, it was once common for people to sleep in two shifts with a period of wakefulness in the middle.

This is called biphasic sleep by scientists who purposefully give things complicated names so that reading them will make people sleepy.

Some researchers have concluded that biphasic sleep is a more authentic reflection of our natural circadian rhythms.

What ended biphasic sleep was something unnatural: the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution, during which machines replaced manual labor, was energized by fresh inventions like the steam engine, artificial light and the Spinning Jenny, which supplanted the practice of spinning yarn in far less efficient ways. It also introduced long working hours and anxiety about sleep.

I have always been a biphasic sleeper. When I was a kid, I would get up in the middle of the night, watch “the late movie” (as it was called in the pre-cable era), then go back to sleep.

I was troubled in those days about being what I did not know would one day be called a biphasic sleeper (although some of that unease probably came from watching all those late movies).

You can imagine how relieved I was to discover that I am, in fact, the normal one.

Meaning, normal in that particular sense. I am probably normal in other senses, but the test results have been inconclusive thus far.

I decided in recent years to stop feeling guilty and anxious about my biphasic sleep pattern.

In fact, I intend to lead a campaign to reintroduce biphasic sleep on a global scale and bring it back into line with what is widely considered to be our natural circadian rhythms.

After I do that, I plan to bring back whatever they had before the Spinning Jenny.

I think it was called the Sluggish Jenny.

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