Sleeping – Regular Guy

Pillow Talk

brian — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:26:42 +0000

Ordinarily, I like change. I think fighting the inevitable flow of life simply makes people upset for no good reason.

Sometimes this means letting go of the things we hold near and dear to our hearts, but that’s the price we pay for living in this modern world. As with most things, however, there are exceptions.

Like my pillow.

Somehow over the past decade or so, my pillow has evolved from a source of comfort and rest to a floppy piece of fabric unfit for man or beast. The thing has lost any source of support.

I stuck by my old friend for a long time. I would fold him up to try and make a half-sized pillow that would meet my needs, but that never quite worked. More often than not, I ended up with an arm underneath the pillow for some support, which would kind of help me sleep, but always resulted in my arm falling asleep.

We have plans to buy a new bed because our current mattress has seen better days, but we started the process the other day by shopping for pillows.

My wife needed some new pillows for the decorative shams which she uses for a backrest when we watch TV in bed. Since the ones she uses now had lost a little of their shape, she figured I could use one of them for my new pillow.

I need a broken in pillow, and all of the pillows in the store were just too firm for my liking. I enthusiastically agreed with this idea.

After a few days, I wanted my floppy, useless pillow back. Maybe it’s because I tried to adjust to the new pillow when Death Valley temperatures decided to descend upon Hanover.

It’s kind of hard to feel comfortable with a new pillow when even your elbows manage to sweat. We had the air conditioning and ceiling fan going, but I still felt way too uncomfortable to give the pillow a fair chance.

I had become too used to sliding one or both of my arms underneath the pillow for support. When I tried that tactic with the new pillow, I just felt all wrong, but I couldn’t find a comfortable position with my arms anywhere else.

When I lay on my side, I would eventually fall asleep, but felt like my head was resting at an angle since the pillow was so much thicker than my old one.

I know. I have a rough life.

I eventually found an older pillow in the closet which seems to be working better. I guess all I can do is wait. I don’t remember how my old pillow started out, but it certainly couldn’t have been that floppy and useless from the beginning. I have to just give this new pillow some time to settle down into something I can live with.

I fear that my nightly sleep won’t be sufficient for this task. I will have to find some time to sleep during the day in order to complete this task.

This is how I come to accept this difficult change. I didn’t realize early on that I would get some extra naps out of this. I should change pillows more often.

I Just Want to Sleep

brian — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:01:16 +0000

I woke up the other morning at my usual time for a weekday, sometime around 5:30. I don’t like that I have to get up that early, but my body has adjusted, and I don’t even need an alarm clock anymore.

Like I usually do, I headed right for the computer. I don’t even try to pretend to be anything other than obsessed with e-mail and social networking. It’s easier to admit you are a geek than to make up excuses to deny the fact.

So I logged into Facebook and started checking out what my friends had posted through the night. Thanks to the aforementioned geekdom and my big family and assorted other connections, I have a lot of friends on there.

At the top of my list was a post from one of the college students I knew from my last job. I like keeping in touch with them for many different reasons.

She also had just woken up. However, her status bemoaned being up “in the middle of the night.”

I had to laugh. I had totally forgotten that my usual wakeup time is an ungodly hour for so many people. I had forgotten that my college self would never believe that 5:30 a.m. would be a familiar time of day in the future.

I always wanted to be that guy who stayed up all night when I was younger. I had some college friends who regularly stayed up to see the sunrise. I could never handle that, even though I would stay up pretty late.

As I have gotten older, I kept telling myself I would stay true to my night owl roots. When I had the chance to stay up late, I tried to take advantage of it to the fullest.

But even that has started to change. When the clock would hit midnight on weekends, I would merely see that as an opportunity to pack in one more hour of fun.

Now I start to think twice and count in my head how much sleep I could get before I had to drag myself out of bed. I calculate the possibility of a nap and wonder how that will affect my sleep the following night.

I don’t like this new part of me, especially since I now have a kid who has mastered the art of sleeping in.

I’m jealous when I see her door still closed at 10 a.m. on the weekend. I really want to be under the covers at that time, but I need to make sure I get my morning walk in and worry about being available if Maria has to work or take care of some errand.

The best chance I have of sleeping at 10 a.m. is if I get back into bed after a busy morning for a nap. And don’t think the thought hasn’t occurred to me on a regular basis.

The worst part is that I have started to accept all of this. When I used to wake up early, I could blame it on parenting and spending time with my child. Now I don’t have that excuse anymore, and I’m just a guy who accomplishes things at 5:30 in the morning.

At least that clears up the rest of the day for me to nap.

Help Me Sleep

brian — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 18:10:44 +0000

I love sleep. Nothing feels better than curling up in a warm bed and drifting off. But something has changed about sleep as I get older. I generally wake up four or five times a night. I glance at the clock, figure out how much longer I have until I need to wake up, then fall right back asleep. I get a lot of sleep, but it is broken into smaller segments.

I probably should be more worried about my sleeping habits, but I don’t feel overly tired so I just let it slide. I actually should be mad because I have never had sleeping problems in the past.

As a kid, I was so difficult to wake up that one of my siblings would have to carry me upstairs for breakfast. I was just a little spoiled.

When they got me upstairs, I would curl up on the top step outside our kitchen to try and catch a little more shuteye. And I would make the rest of the family eat breakfast with the kitchen lights off so as not to disturb my slumber.

OK, I was really spoiled.

As I got older, I was less demanding about my sleep pattern, but I managed to get as much sleep as possible. Like any teenager, I would stay up as late as possible and sleep pretty much all of the morning on weekends and in the summer.

Things accelerated when I got to college. Sometimes, I could schedule my classes around my sleep patterns.

I could make sure to have a 9:20 class, but nothing else until the afternoon. That way, I could get enough sleep to make it through class and still catch a nap without impacting my lunch plans.

But the more people I met at college, the more I realized that I was a rank amateur. My friend Brett could have turned pro in sleeping, which would have been beneficial because his love of the nap pretty much sunk his academic career.

I remember introducing Brett to a girl I knew who wanted to date him. They hit it off, but I couldn’t believe what they talked about.

Naps. They compared the best times to nap. They shared their opinions on the best place to nap. They swapped notes on the most comfortable place to nap.

Now that’s dedication to your sleep.

I tried to monkey with my sleeping patterns even as an adult, working odd shifts at the newspaper and enjoying the freedom to sleep all afternoon after pulling an overnight shift.

Then we had a kid. And sleep turned into a chore instead of a pleasure.

First of all, Bridget doesn’t believe in napping. She won’t even consider crashing for a few hours in the afternoon, which means my nap opportunities are limited.

Secondly, I know pretty much know when I have to wake up with a 4-year-old in the house. I have a human alarm clock instead of staying in bed as long as I want.

Maybe that’s why I wake up so much. I know someone is going to come and get me eventually. Unfortunately, she can’t carry me to the kitchen.