When I was a little girl, I used to sleep the sleep of the dead. I would fall out of bed in the night and not wake up due to the fall but rather because my mother was waking me up telling me to get back in bed. When we moved from my grandfather’s I had my own room with princess furniture. I continued to fall out of the bed, but now, the floor was less forgiving. It was a concrete floor instead of wood. When I rolled one time too many, I probably sounded like a dead body. The few times I fell from the bed at that place, I would wake up crying and disoriented because the impact hurt enough to awaken me. However, my mother found a workaround – she placed fold up chairs next to the bed so that when I rolled over the third time of two allowances I would roll onto the chairs. It worked. The chairs caught me and I never hit the floor after that. Who knows how long it took me to not roll out of the bed though…
In college, our dorm had a serious prankster who would trip the fire alarm at 2 and 3am – repeatedly. Usually, I would scurry downstairs and out of the building with my roommates and complain about it with everyone else the next day. However, there was one day where everyone else was complaining about evacuating the building – except me because I knew nothing of it. When I returned to my dorm, I confronted one of my roommates and told her (full of righteous indignation) that I could not believe they left me in the apartment to potentially die (there were times the prankster would start a fire in the trash chute as well). At that moment she gave me a look of complete incredulity – and cursed me out. She explained that I was awake and in my robe when she last saw me. I was going to put on clothes to go outside. She and our other roommates left because we were all awake and preparing to leave. The only problem was I wasn’t really awake but sleep walking. I managed to crawl right back into bed and go back to sleep (or resume the position of sleep since I never really woke up). When they returned, they assumed I somehow was the first to get back in the room and thought nothing of it.
In my thirties, I was presented with another sleep conundrum – seizure-like behavior during my sleep. The first times I heard about it, the reports were innocent sounding “you must have gotten cold last night because you were shivering” or “what were YOU dreaming about because all of a sudden you started shaking.” Because the behaviors were described rather innocently and were random at best, I never thought anything of it other than, “oh, that again.” That is, until it was thought I was having a seizure. As in the scenario with the fire alarm, I woke up innocently the next morning feeling like “hello world.” Until I saw the worried look on his face. Instead of the innocent descriptions of shivering, I was presented with a report that my body was shaking all over. It started in one part of my body and increased to include my entire body. Behavior that was perceived as innocent tics had now turned into an alarming case of something else. So much so that he was scrambling trying to figure out if he needed to get a spoon and struggling to remember what else you do in the event of a seizure. I had no realization of what had transpired and would have thought he was joking, so fantastical was the nature of his description, if it had not been the look of “there is something severely wrong” on his face.
It was then that I scheduled the sleep study. I spent the night with electrodes attached to places all over my face and scalp for one night. I went back to the doctor for the results. No seizure-like behavior ever presented itself (of course). However, he did note that I had the WORST sleep pattern possible. I never remained in REM long enough, I cycled into and out of REM repeatedly. For that, he prescribed a sleeping pill which I took until just before the bottle ran out. I lived alone and didn’t want to be soooo out of it that I didn’t know what I was doing, although, come to think of it, that was the state I was in anyway. He also suggested/recommended/advised that I stay away from caffeine. He made it very clear that he meant caffeine and not coffee by rattling off a list of things that contained caffeine – including chocolate.
Years later, here I am awake at 2:56am writing. I woke up around 1:20 or so and felt fully awake although I couldn’t have fallen asleep until around 11pm or so. Usually, the three o’clock hour is my waking time. It would seem coffee could be a culprit (I did have some today) but I quit Starbucks a while back and have had sporadic coffee since then but regular three o’clock (or some other off hour) awakenings.
Sleep (or better yet, sleep of the dead), I miss you. Come back. Soon.
PS: One night, while not sleeping, I ran into this short story on insomnia from Jackie Summers who posts at The Good Men Project.