Nothing.

The man had been on a booze-and-cocaine bender for more than a week. But it wasn’t the ravages of addiction that left him so distraught. It was his inability to sleep.

Battered by booze but bolstered by coke, the young man simply could not sleep. After days of unwanted consciousness, his grip on reality was tenuous. He was exhausted, depressed and lonely. After all, when are we more alone than when denied one of our basic needs?

Suffering insomnia is like being exiled from a sacred place – a place where we spend a third of our lives. A door you’ve floated through thousands of nights before is closed to you without explanation. It’s like being banned from a world where everyone else dwells nightly.

You may notice that my sentences are disjointed. I seem to be rambling where I should be concise. The problem is all these bats flapping around my head. These horrible things come flying along every time I suffer a bout of insomnia.

OK, maybe I’m exaggerating. I haven’t begun hallucinating just yet. I haven’t felt my fingers creeping desperately for a long gun. But insomnia is a scary, desolate place. In the wee hours, you can feel the entire world breathing with restful slumber while you thrash in the blankets.

I’ve suffered the affliction off and on since I was a child. Morpheus, that elusive god of sleep, just puts me on his “ignore” list sometimes. The ticking clock becomes your only friend, though you hate it. There’s no one to talk to because normal people are snoozing grandly. The selfish wretches.

Insomnia is tricky when your normal bedtime is four or five in the morning. I become trapped in horrible wakefulness while the daylight world rumbles on. I get the feeling of being buried alive. People come and go around my sleepless corpse as if I’m not even there. Don’t bury me, I want to scream! I’m not asleep!

So, I exaggerate. But when deprived of sleep, thoughts turn fleeting and fanciful. Waking dreams take over conscious thought. One strange idea turns into a stranger one. It’s like a movie in your head, written by a madman and directed by a sadist.

I try to count sheep, but they take on the faces of mean-spirited editors, with horns and dripping fangs. They bray, jump over a fence and demand that I write stories about the weather. Suddenly. I’m awake and shivering in the closet.

Unable to sleep, I’ve pulled all-nighters. I spend ensuing days in a sort of restrained delirium, laughing at things that aren’t even mildly funny, overreacting to the smallest of slights. I console myself that it happens to everyone. But it’s a lie. A young lady I spoke to about the affliction confessed that she’d never experienced insomnia, not once in her life. “What’s that like, anyway?” she asked me. “I mean, you really can’t go to sleep?”

We are no longer friends.

The causes of insomnia are many: depression, stress and overuse of stimulants are just a few. But sometimes these things are absent. You just can’t sleep, and thinking about why only keeps you awake longer. I believe that on occasion, the mind and the body take separate vacations.

Nonsufferers are quick to suggest cures. Drink warm milk, they’ll tell you. Try exercising right before bed. I’ve heard suggestions ranging from placing an onion in a jar to sleeping under the bed.

But when you’re in the grip of it, nothing short of injecting powerful narcotics directly into your eyeballs will help. You have to reside in the landscape of the terminally awake, like Stephen King characters in another dimension.

The man with the rifle, his insomnia took a weird turn. He tried to end it with a blast to the head and failed. He was first denied sleep and then denied the final resolution. He checked himself into a clinic and sought a cure for everything at once.

I haven’t seen or spoken to him in years. I’d call, but he’s probably sleeping. And I really need to do something about all the bats in here.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.