I’ve recently fractured my tailbone and am balancing on a lumbar cushion to try and stop myself from putting any weight on my coccyx.

Strapped to my chest is the reason for the fractured tailbone and the lack of sleep: my three-month-old daughter. She’ll only sleep if she’s making physical contact with me.

It’s a strange irony: the book I wrote while sleeping eight hours a night is about an insomniac. Now, with a newborn waking me every hour, I am attempting the edit. I scroll through the chapter. My character, Jo, is having a mental breakdown in a hotel room. She’s alternating between gorging herself at the hotel’s buffet breakfast, hysterically crying, and double-dosing Temazepam to sleep for 12 hours straight. I envy her.

Can you go crazy from sleep deprivation? I type into Google. The answer is a very clear yes.

Can you go crazy from sleep deprivation? I type into Google. The answer is a very clear yes. Irritability, delusions, paranoia, psychosis and parasomnia are on the list.

Last night I woke to a shadowy man standing at the end of my bed. When I tried to move, I couldn’t. My whole body was paralysed. The man leaned down towards me as his teeth grew long and thin, fanged and ready to bite. I tried to twist my body away but my muscles weren’t responding. I tried to move my head, but couldn’t.

My heart had never raced so fast. My baby wailed and I managed to pull myself into full consciousness. There was no man, no hungry nightmare animal. I picked up my daughter and held her to me, feeling like she’d saved me from being eaten alive.

Google tells me that sleep paralysis is temporarily being unable to move as you fall asleep or wake up. It’s a strange slip in the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness in which your dreams become waking hallucinations. Your body thinks you’re asleep, so you’re unable to move. Apparently intruder hallucinations are the most common during sleep paralysis. It’s something that carries across cultures, a kind of shared primal fear.

I close my internet browser and go back to my novel. Jo is now working at a mango farm in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

Jo opens her eyes but it makes no difference. It’s too dark to see. The figure has moved closer to her, towards the end of her bed. She can’t see him but she can feel him. The presence radiates heat. Then something twitches against the curve of her calf.

The farmer’s pre-teen son has put a snake in her bed as payback for an earlier incident in the book. I gape at the page. Was my own waking nightmare not a shared, primal, consciousness-collective experience, but rather my own imagination from when I wrote that scene two years ago? Is my own book literally giving me the worst nightmares of my life? I add an apostrophe, delete a comma and then add it back.

Apparently intruder hallucinations are the most common during sleep paralysis. It’s something that carries across cultures, a kind of shared primal fear.

Would this scene work better in a later chapter? Jo has commented. My editor’s name is Jo, her assistant’s name is Jo, the publicist’s name is Jo, my character’s name is Jo. Maybe the line between my novel and my world is slipping. Maybe I’m actually asleep and this is all an absurdist dream. Maybe that scene would work better in a later chapter.

I decide to leave that bit for later. I scroll through suggested changes. Jo the editor is good at her job; her comments are insightful and full of nuance and emotional intelligence. On the other hand, I am finding the plot of Where’s Spot? hard to follow.

As I scroll through the chapter, my brain fogs. I know I can do this. I used to be able to do this. If I could just have more than one hour of sleep at a time I’d be okay. I’m not greedy, two hours straight would do. Two hours straight would be blissful.

I skip the grammar and go to the next comment. Jo the character is now in the full throes of insomnia and has run out of sleeping pills. She’s met a woman who lives in a small community on the coast and who promises to help her sleep. Jo has no transport, so she considers walking into the orange horizon to try to find her.

Logic? Jo the editor has commented. Would anyone really do this?

Definitely, I reply. Stet.

My daughter stirs on my chest. Tiny fingers twitching, nubby toes flexing. I try to settle her, swaying from side to side on the lumbar cushion and humming Celine Dion but it’s no use. She looks up at me and grins and I kiss her little bald head and close my computer because I haven’t lost my mind enough to think I’ll be editing another word today.

That night, by some unknown miracle, my daughter sleeps. She keeps sleeping. An hour passes. I snuggle into the duvet, ready to slide into delicious, beautiful, miraculous unconsciousness. Another hour passes. Just like my poor character, sleepiness has receded. I’m wide awake.

Out of Breath (HarperCollins) by Anna Snoekstra is out July 6.

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