invasive brain-eating aliens

A nap seemed like a good idea, until I laid down and my sinuses filled up like a trash can left open in the rain.

I need to be able to lay on my side in bed again. I used to be able to, before I got all flabby and started injuring myself just by having bad posture. That’s what a physical therapist said I was doing, anyway. Mothers, when you tell your kids to sit up straight and they ask you why, tell them the story that my physical therapist told me: When you slump over, the tendons in your upper arms get dragged across the ball joint in your shoulder and pinched between it and your rotator cuff. The result: Reaching over your head to put on your shirt will cause such exquisite and enduring pain that you will whimper like a whipped dog. There, that’ll give the little tykes nightmares, won’t it?

The physical therapist said sleeping on my side had the same effect as slumping over and that I would seriously injure myself if I continued to do it. Trouble is, I’ve been sleeping on my side for so many years that, even when I make the conscious effort to sleep on my back, I still wake up in the middle of the night curled up on my side and, not surprisingly, I’ve got the shooting pains down my arm that sent me to a physical therapist in the first place.

But I can’t fall asleep on my back. If I try to, and I go through that state between wakefulness and sleep when all the muscles in my body are going slack, my tongue slides down my throat and feels like it’s trying to climb out of my head through my nose. Of course, it’s impossible to breathe when there’s a tongue crawling into my nose, so my lungs will kick the suction all the way up to eleven, I guess in an attempt to dislodge the blockage. Which is, in fact, what happens, with a sound that’s a cross between a snort and a gunshot.

As if that wasn’t enough to make me into a chronic insomniac, sometimes my own subconscious will mess with me and I’ll have the dream about an alien garden slug the size of my forearm crawling into my mouth to tunnel its way to my brain so it can possess my body and walk among you all. Try falling asleep after something like that.

So that’s why I miss being able to lay on my side: Invasive brain-eating aliens. If you can come up with a solution for me, I’ll brew a batch of beer for you. I don’t deliver, though, so you’ll have to come pick it up.