I just woke from a nightmare that lasted all night. Literally all night: I woke at 4am in a cold sweat, went back to sleep and the whole thing began again. I was trapped in a huge house trying to stop a wedding from happening and trying to escape. There were guns and dogs and someone a bit like Heathcliff trying to stop me. And the whole thing was replete with “Oh my God, I’m still in the dream” moments.  I am genuinely shaken.

I’ve never had an anxiety dream before. At the moment I’m re-reading The Monk, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho. I think they’re getting inside my brain. At least, I hope that’s all it is. I can’t handle another night like that.

Just had to get that out there.

I often wake in the middle of the night, with what I imagine at the time to be a game-changingly insightful or brilliant train of thought suspended in mid-air in front of me. I’m immmediately gripped by panic, worried that I might lose it if I don’t get it down. So I flip open my MacBook and start typing furiously. When I’m done, I get back in to bed, and am usually asleep again within a few minutes.

I have about three hundred of these frantically-recorded night-time memos now. Here’s one of them.

How bda could things get if social networking turned nasty?
the major engine of destructon could be the recession
in a recessuibm cult-0liuke cgroupd form around certaub individuals
exciting at first
as in evey pyramid scheme, the btrsk poiny srrives
how could beple use twitter to wreak havoc in the sreets
could Teitter be used as an instument of ctimr, ettort,m  twitter
rumors srtrrt of a salr in an oxford st sotore which is mnot relas big dicounts ptomised
rivl stores employd twittered to =do it
talk of huge surprisie discounts
certain people hav been given tweets with info
some staff in on it – believe it
ma7ybe eve =n some of the management
discount not materialise
riot
 
“city markry guru”
usese twitter to broadcast predicutions
aciting oon inside informatiob first 2 times
third time del talking down stocks so he canbuy at t tht loest point
 
How Twitter could spiral out of control
Factional at present, bit mpt int he sense of occoping campes: thse are veast interlocoking netweorks ofr like and lyalties that a re sometiges inf conflict.
“I really like him, as a person, but I read he blog vbery fght qinf
fractiuring of elleigances eeven in 1to1 peronsal reaptionshops
 
beceuase breviously your 1on1 partner got jut oner verion of you – now they get the whole public perona
I becomes impossible to tell a lie. Oj e slip, a tweet from the bous as ou’re waiting to arrive t your destination, and the firends your ditchingt will lnow what they were dumped for

Don’t get me wrong: I hugely admire Ben Goldacre for his vicious skewering of hacks who peddle bad science. It’s just that I have this irrational fear that one day I’m going to open the newspaper and read that he’s keeping his followers captive in a jungle compound.

I mean, don’t you think it’s all going to his head a bit? Especially since he didn’t win the Samuel Johnson prize. (Sorry, Ben, that just slipped out – I didn’t mean it. Put that meat cleaver down!)