Nightly Mysteries: Solved!

Nothing is more annoying than waking up tired when you went to bed at a decent hour and are expecting to start the day fully rested. At least, not in my book. I take that as a personal affront.

Alas, this has been my fate the past two weeks. It’s a mystery to me, how I can manage to get a solid 8 hours of sleep (not without breaks, sadly) and still wake up feeling wrung out and lightheaded. And like any mystery in my life, I have been working on getting it solved. True Sherlock Holmes style.

I have analyzed what I know about my sleeping behavior (intel gathered from past sleepovers, ex-partners and other folk that were in my vicinity in the nocturnal hours.) and gathered up what I know about healthy sleeping patterns. Not that that yielded any results other than a painful awareness of my hefty tossing and turning bed movements, the nosecold-ridden or alcohol-induced snoring, the haunting time spent awake in the middle of the night and most importantly: the talking in my sleep. Enough to make ‘the first night together’ a really big deal in my dating career. Horrific.

Especially that last item has been a burden of my non-solo-sleeping life. Going to bed KNOWING you might say idiotic, or weird or painful things while you’re out for the count is scary as fuck. Especially when the people you sleep with always find recounting said occurrences hilarious.

There’s been sleepovers where I’ve unwillingly confessed my undying love for crush-at-the-time. Sports camps where every participant yelled ‘GET TO THE TREASURE!’ at random (and frequent) intervals as a reminder of my (apparent) nightly treasure hunting behaviors. And relationships where I’ve possibly traumatized partners by waking up screaming during the night, having clawed open my own chest so deep that blood was gushing out of 4 claw-marks (as if a werewolf had come in and swooped down on me) after a particularly bad nightmare where I was trying to fight someone off.

I am a terror to sleep next to. It’s a fact. But that should in no way affect my current solo-sleeping, I figured. Wrong. Because when you wake up like you’ve just been running for a couple of hours, out of breath and with a dry mouth (like you’ve been talking for way too long uninterruptedly) – ya know something is off. And where I normally have a good hold on my dreams and nightmares, being able to remember them to the tiniest details – these past few weeks I’ve been drawing blanks. No memories whatsoever.

So I downloaded an app. That’s what we technology-savvy people do, right? Download an app to solve all our problems. This particular one records your sleeping ‘behavior’. Allows you to replay your nights rest to gain insight in your snoring, wheezing or (in my case) talking. I figured that if I could find out what I was up to during the night, I might have a better grip on a solution.

Turns out: I. Am. A. Disgrace.

A while back I wrote about my libido having died off after a prolonged period of nothing-ness in the love department. Said state is currently still ongoing – which I thought was fine. Which I thought I’d accepted. Which I thought just meant that the interest was gone from my body. Boy, was I wrong. Because in playing back my goings-on during the night from last night, I now know where that particular appetite might have gone.

I just sat here with cheeks glowing a bright red listening to myself dirty talk through what sounds like a VERY satisfactory dreamed-up tumble with god-knows-who. In vivid wordings. Way too explicit (sleep me is without boundaries, it seems). With added moans. And shuffling bedding. This recording might’ve made good money in one of those hot-and-bothered sex-lines we used to secretly call 15 years ago because it was so forbidden and naughty.

Turns out – I get down and dirty in my sleep.

Which makes for hilarious playbacks and, apparently, tiring nights. I wonder if you burn as much calories during fictional sex as in doing the real thing. Because damn, I’ll be thin in no time if that’s the case. Guess my libido isn’t gone. It’s just moved to my subconscious. Dammit. I rather enjoy these things while fully present. And a solution? Google doesn’t know a lot about fixing sleep-sexing. Dammit.