Sleep

It’s 4 am. I’m supposed to be fast asleep in bed, given I’m on vacation, and apart from the incessant waves crashing outside, there’s no real reason I should be up. But here I am.

I’m used to sleeping without anyone touching me. The lightest touch startles me awake. On most days at home, I go to sleep at night and don’t stir again until the kids are up and the morning commotion takes over the house. The one rare touch I actually look forward to is my son or daughter running in to hug me before they leave for school.

On trips, though, my son sleeps in the middle of the bed. He moves, twists, turns constantly, and even the lightest touch from him jolts me awake. It takes a while to fall back asleep, and when I finally do, I stay stuck in REM, dreaming while staying half-awake.

With all the sleep tracking I do, I’ve also learned that if I sleep less than six hours for two or three consecutive days, my immunity drops and I come down with a cold, almost without exception. Sleeping enough keeps it at bay.

This is what my typical sleep looks like on this trip.

The cycle of repeated waking

I love deep sleep. Ironically, every time I wake up, the only thing that feels like it would help me fall back asleep is someone holding me down. So I just lie there thinking until my eyes finally start to shut, which they rarely do.

This morning, right before I got up, I dreamed about my dad. I was in our ancestral home, doing something in the bathroom, when I heard a noise at the door leading in from the adjoining room. Somehow I knew his caretaker wasn’t around, so I stepped out and saw my dad standing there, choking. I rushed over and made him vomit. Food came pouring out, completely unchewed, so much of it, none of it chewed at all. I caught it all in a vessel, wondering why he wasn’t chewing his food in the first place. I decided I needed to check his teeth, half-suspecting he’d lost them all and that I’d somehow been careless enough not to notice. My mom walked in a few minutes later, asking what was happening, and I explained it all to her. She started advising me on what to do, who to see, and most of all, on his diet. That’s where the dream ended. All of it felt painfully relatable given the last few days, a direct echo of the panic from the three times I’ve had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him. The third time, I ran down eleven floors and climbed up seven in a matter of minutes, thinking about what even a single second of delay could cost. His caretaker had called to say the food was stuck and he couldn’t breathe. I was in a different house entirely and just had to act.

I rarely see my mom in my dreams, so this was one of the rare times she showed up. Same with the house I spent my early childhood in.

The state of that house is deteriorating by the day. I need to find the time to go get it repaired, before a wall or a ceiling actually comes down and turns this into a much bigger problem.