To Arms!

I'm not proud of this.

Several times a night, I wake up and can't figure out what to do with my arms. This is in spite of the fact that they have been part of my basic equipment for as long as I can remember. I have gone to sleep something like 23,000 times and it's still an issue. Anyone would think I could have worked it out by now, but I haven't.

I will wake up on my side with one arm crunched under me and my fist under my pillow, and the other fist crunched up under my chin. I am a giant mantis. One or both hands might feel achy or strained. I stretch out the topmost arm to get the kinks out and unfurl it along the mattress, but then it's insufficient as a buttress and I start to slump.

So I roll over onto my stomach, my preferred sleeping position, and elaborately re-punch my pillow so as to support my forehead while excavating a breathing pocket. Arms meet over my head, under the pillow. This is a delicate adjustment and I can spend several minutes getting it right. I am trying to avoid the situation where I dream about being underwater too long and finally jolt awake gasping because my face is solidly pressed into the mattress. So far, I am old enough to jolt awake and move, and not so old that I can't, but that time's coming.

My mother, I believe, put me face down to sleep when I was an infant. People get all worked up about that sort of thing now, but this was during the post-war baby boom and there wasn't such a big fuss about keeping any one baby alive. Evidently I was resourceful enough or round enough to survive and I have been a stomach-sleeper since forever, which was in 1953.

But it's a pity, because the only way to sleep without your arms getting in the way is to sleep on your back, which I can't seem to do.

Arms are important, of course, but mainly it's the wiggly bits at the ends that seal the deal on most transactions, drawing, or jar-opening, or the like, and the arms just get you a bit of reach (no offense to Thalidomide-Americans). The rest of the time they dangle from your shoulders and swing weirdly. Imagine how befuddled your standard gazelle would be, bounding across the plain, and watching our front legs flopping around like that.

Your arms aren't really supposed to be doing anything when you're asleep, and if they are, nobody wants to hear about it. But for most of us there are not a lot of options for how they're hooked up to the anatomy. Your shoulders aren't necessarily where you want them while you're sleeping but they're not deflatable.

Nothing like this is a problem for my cat Tater, who occasionally sleeps right next to me. For a fifteen-pound mammal, she can really pin down a blanket. I've never seen her look at all uncomfortable. I don't know exactly what is inside her fuzzy packaging, but I do know it is well past al dente.

For me, though, it gets fussy. I can get one arm all unrolled and spread out and I move it an inch up or an inch down until the humors feel unrestricted again, but by that time I need to find the cool spot. If nothing gets worked out in a hurry there's a danger I will wake up enough to imagine solutions, such as arms that retract like hoses when you're not using them, or a pit drilled into the mattress to accommodate a face rest with a drool bucket underneath, or a suspended shoulder-hammock made of butterfly wings, and if I think about it long enough to realize these solutions don't really make sense, then I'm really really awake, and vulnerable to remembering who's President.

Wish Mom had put me on my back.

Into The Neutral-Weave Arms Of Morpheus

It's well before my bedtime, and Dave is sound asleep on the Sleep Fumes Couch. Dave is not a good sleeper. He gets by on the virtue of the first three or four solid hours he gets just after finishing dinner, and then he cobbles together a mosaic of wakefulness, TV, brief losses of consciousness, and the internet, until he gives up around dawn and starts another productive day. He can sleep in the car. In fact he can't stay awake as a passenger in a moving automobile. When he's really short of sleep he's been known to beg me to drive him around. There aren't really too many adults who get all the sleep they want. It's a gift.

That's why we think of our Sleep Fumes Couch as a gift, freely offered to anyone who visits our cabin. No one is immune. When we bought the place, it came with furnishings, such as they were. They included mismatched cutlery, board games, antique packets of cocoa, and a fair amount of furniture that couldn't withstand ordinary adult use. So a lot of that has gone by the wayside and been replaced by garage-sale items of equal cheapness and more substance.  The Sleep Fumes Couch that came with the place is an exception. It has reigned in its original position from the get-go.

It's sturdy and has one of those '80s neutral, unobtrusive weaves. Nothing objectionable about it. In all likelihood it has served, or is serving, as bedding material or actual beds for a transient rodent population. No matter. At some point anyone who visits this cabin will find him or herself irretrievably drawn to sit on the couch, possibly sprawl a little, and then be sucked into it like an octopus in coral. They virtually disappear. Their mouths gape. Noises are emitted. Everyone not on the couch, which is everyone else at this point--because they are taking up the whole thing--is quite amused by this. Photographs are taken. We all feel a little superior because we, personally, have not lost control of our saliva in the middle of the day. But our time's coming.

We can only surmise that the Couch has magical Sleep Fumes in it, and we are all helpless in its vicinity until Glinda the Good Witch shows up and snows on us. There's a possibility that the lure of the Sleep Fumes Couch has something to do with the confluence of abundant clean air and fatty foods and romping good exercise and a nearby stoked wood stove and, gosh, alcohol. But you never see people curled up on the floor, or with their foreheads plonked into the mashed potatoes, except that once, and there was Benadryl involved then.

No. It's the magical Sleep Fumes in the Sleep Fumes Couch. I wish I could bottle them.

Nocturnal Emissions

Dave snores. It's not so bad. Mostly it's just one big chainsaw outburst after a nice six- or seven-minute interval during which he does not breathe at all. It's called sleep apnea, and it wouldn't be a problem except for that danger of death thing. There's supposed to be a significant increase of mortality among people with sleep apnea, although no one mentions that dying in your sleep is pretty much the ideal way of going about it, and besides, how do they know the apnea got them? If they just notice people die after they haven't breathed in a while, that could be dang near anything. Anyway, right after I diagnosed this condition off the internet, and put in ten or fifteen years of nagging, Dave went in for a sleep study. He was worried about it because he has trouble sleeping and he couldn't imagine that being wired up in a strange bed was going to be conducive to dropping off. But it wasn't a problem. They just drugged him right up and out he went. He concluded that the reason he had trouble sleeping was no one had given him the cool drugs before, and thought that should solve the whole thing, but they weren't going for it. Surprisingly enough, they also decided he didn't have apnea, or at least badly.

So now I'm putting what I thought was apnea in the same category as Other Odd Metabolic Metrics Of Dave. For instance, he has a pulse of around seventy beats an hour, his cholesterol is below zero (he eats so much butter the fatty deposits slide right out of his bloodstream), his blood pressure indicates his circulatory system is more of a puddle, and he requires little oxygen while sleeping, shutting down like a frog in ice. At any rate, I've quit worrying about the snoring. It was never as impressive as that other noise he makes from time to time while asleep, a high-pitched high-decibel ripping volcanic blast that causes regiments to leap out of bed and stand at attention, and wood-chippers and leaf-blowers to revere him as a god. I am, as regular readers know, far too much of a lady to divulge the source of this phenomenon, but it is world-class.

He claims I snore, too, enough to ripple wallpaper and make the shades go up and down and change the channels on the TV in the next room, but he is given to hyperbole. My main problem while asleep is that I am a fountain of drool. I wake up several times a night to discover the lower half of my face has gone slack, sprung its elastic and sprawled over the pillow. And since I am primarily a stomach-sleeper, this means I am waking up with one cheek and nostril in the Atlantic Ocean. I roll to the other side and plant the other cheek in the Pacific. There's no escaping it.

I didn't always drool. It started on a specific day, the day I had my lower wisdom teeth sawed out of my face at age sixteen. Dr. Mengele recommended I press tea bags to my gums if the bleeding was a problem, but I was unable to fit that many tea bags in my mouth. The bleeding went on undiminished for a good four days, during which time my digestive system had time to come up with a new plan for the hours I was asleep, and drooling was a central component. This became the default plan, and I probably can't undo it without duct-taping my mouth shut, and that makes me nervous. Sure as shit, some rapist would pick that night to pop by.

It's not a minor amount, either. I lose a pound every night, and it's a pound of drool. There's enough DNA there to connect me to fifty years of felonious activity. If I die and enough people decide they miss Murrmurrs and want to bring me back, this is the first place they should look for cloning material. It won't even be dry yet.