It came to my attention recently that I have been dying in my sleep.
Let me explain that I am not, in fact, crazy. I am, however, extremely tired, and with the weather being what it is (the sort of hot that makes you reconsider every life choice that led you to live somewhere that it can get this fucking hot, the sort of hot that causes your brain to become foggy because it is boiling) I haven’t been sleeping that well. It does cool off somewhat in the evenings, but apart from cooling the apartment down just enough that it does not become a murderous heatbox the following too-hot day, sleep is elusive. I already have enough trouble sleeping when the weather isn’t a travesty, so you can imagine my displeasure.
But recently, sleep has… well, it’s still eluded me, but I’ve been losing time in the way that usually suggests sleeping. Problem is, I don’t feel well-rested in the morning – just stiff and numb and even more sluggish than usual. I hit consciousness like a bug hitting a windscreen now: blunt trauma all at once and the feeling that there’s been some kind of mistake.
I figured, like any rational person, that I should try to track my sleep – so I got a watch with a heart monitor and a sleep sensor and all the trimmings and started wearing it. That is, as the people say, where the trouble started. Or was brought to my attention, anyway. Namely, that when I went to check my sleep stats for the first night, I was informed the watch had failed to gather any usable data. Sure enough, when I looked at my pulse statistics, I did not, in fact, appear to have a pulse.
It is important to note that I did not jump directly to “oh I was dead.” In fact, I just assumed I hadn’t had the watch on properly – too tight, or too loose, one or the other – so I carefully read the instructions for best results and followed them to the letter. The following morning I again checked my results and was greeted by the same error. No pulse, so no sleep score. Also, no movement during the period of time where I had no pulse, apparently! Which is how sleep is supposed to work, except you are supposed to have a pulse, which I did not. I gave the watch a week to sort itself out, performing factory resets and adjustments, before giving up and getting a replacement. The results were the same for the replacement, and the subsequent four other replacements, as well as the other brands of heart monitoring watch that I switched to. Every morning I was given the same information: no pulse, no movement. I was, as far as the watch was concerned, dead.
The rational response to this was to sign up for a sleep study, which I did. After explaining my problem to the technician, I was assured that as far as they were concerned it was probably just a streak of bad luck with the tech – or maybe something about my skin just made reading a pulse that way difficult. When I pointed out that I had a detectable pulse during the day (the watch was useful for tracking my fitness when running), I got a puzzled look and a shrug.
My first night of the sleep study was unsuccessful. The various monitoring equipment all reported that it could not in fact get a pulse, breathing pattern, or sign of movement. The technician who greeted me in the morning was apologetic, claiming they must have experienced a catastrophic equipment failure. I did not bother showing up for the second night of the study.
I do not know exactly what the effects of dying every night have on me, beyond being extremely annoying. Death, as I turns out, is not particularly restful. When I revive in the mornings, I am still tired. It is almost, I think, like I am busier in death than I am in my daily life – thus, I don’t get any rest.
I wonder what it is my soul gets up to.
I wonder where it goes.
I am not sure that I want to know.
