Jan
7
Apparently I am one of those people who does things when they are asleep and has no memory of doing them afterwards. Which is funny, because my sleep for this past little while is so fragmented and fitful — you’d think that with all the million times I wake up during the night, I’d remember SOMETHING.
But no.
BDH used to tell me about whole conversations we would have in the middle of the night, when he’d come home from a support call or something. I tried to play along that I knew what the hell he was talking about, but after awhile I had to admit that I had no clue. No memory whatsoever.
When I was a kid, I wore braces. And with braces comes headgear. And with headgear comes me, taking it off in my sleep and dropping it off the side of the bed onto the floor. Completely unawares, mind you. I’d wake up to find my headgear somewhere on the floor within throwing radius of my bed.
And now, I have my mask, my CPaP for sleeping.
My mask does not escape the wonder that is the sleeping Me. Oh no. Generally speaking I am pretty good about keeping it on, for the most part. Occasionally I will find it lying beside me on my pillow, but those times I know why — usually it was that I pulled it off my face to readjust it or scratch my nose or something, and just fell back asleep before I managed to put it back on. No big deal. And sometimes I have a mask lying on the bed beside me, but generally those times I got frustrated with it or whatever. I often have a vague recollection of those ones, too, because generally speaking I make the conscious “Oh SCREW it” decision and I take it off and lay it carefully on the bed beside me out of danger of rolling over on it or getting tangled in the hose.
And then there are the headgear moments, when I wake up and find the mask flung to the floor over beside the bed in an odd pile. Those ones I don’t remember so much.
And then there’s last night.
Apparently, at some point after 2 am (when I woke up, took off my iPod and placed it carefully on the night table, checked the time, and rolled over and went back to sleep) and before 8:45 am this morning (when I woke up with a sneeze or twelve and realized I’d slept without my mask and was paying for it with my allergies) I took off my mask. But not just took it off — oh no.
Apparently I took it off, got the hose all neatly organized, and placed it carefully over on the night table. On the far side. On the far side of the machine, next to the wall. Which takes some doing, because I originally set all this gear up, I purposefully put the machine far out of reach to avoid it being knocked off the night table by flailing hands and blankets and whatnot. It would have taken me getting up and reaching way over to get it placed as neatly as it was.
But I was asleep. Wasn’t I?
I got up and came up to see BDH at his computer. And I actually had to ask him if he had done it for me.
Nope.
So as I suffer the ill-effects of a mask-free night and sneeze my brains out and rub my itchy eyes until they are black like I’ve been in a bar fight, I have to ask myself: Just what the hell else have I been doing in my sleep?
Wandering around the house? Tap dancing? Robbing banks?
And why is it that I can’t wake up to discover a nicely folded stack of clean laundry?
