I'm no Debian expert and you haven't even said what window manager or hibernate utility you are using. Time to read up, or try Google. Also, it could be an issue. Restart acpid as
and it logs stuff to syslog. In a terminal run
and event acpid acts upon is shown. Acpi sees events (usually in /etc/acpi/events) and runs appropriate scripts, (usually in /etc/acpi). Scripts for some laptops are kind of weird, and you need a good one.
What you take awayis that hibernate works. You can use that command every time for the moment.