Tag: sleeplessness

sleepy time

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

We used to let our cats sleep with us, but after we brought Scooter home from the Dane County Humane Society two Christmases ago, we had to lock them out because Scooter wanted to sleep on our heads.

I don’t like a cat sleeping on my pillow. Anywhere else but my pillow is okay, but for whatever neurotic reason is buried deep in my hind brain, I get squicked out by cats on my pillow. It might have something to do with waking up with a cat butt parked next to my face. Ew.

My Darling B doesn’t mind having a cat on her pillow, but Scooter isn’t satisfied by just curling up on top of her head and going to sleep. He also wants to shove his nose in her ear and purr loudly while kneading the back of her neck with his razor-sharp talons. This, for obvious reasons, does not fly with B.

So we locked him out, which meant that we also had to lock Boo out. I felt bad about that, because she never bothered us. Well, she never bothered me. She usually sleeps curled up next to B’s butt, and I’m okay with that, but B says she’s like a hot-water bottle, and B doesn’t need a hot-water bottle. I’d like that, but I like sleeping under five or six layers of quilts.

The downside of locking Scooter out is that he usually scratches at the door in the middle of the night, whining to be let in. B can sleep through that. I can’t, so I have to lie there, wide awake, until he gives up and goes away, and then I have to lie there a while longer until I fall asleep again, or until the alarm clock starts to bleep, whichever comes first.

So it was either let him in and get squicked out when I woke up and found his butt parked on my pillow, or lock him out and lose an hour or more of sleep a night. Waking up with a cat butt in my face was worse, I figured, so we kept locking him out.

My job required me to hit the road almost every week starting in July. I drive to the farthest reaches of Wisconsin, so far away that I sometimes have to stay there overnight before driving back. When I’m gone overnight, B lets the cats into the bedroom at night, to keep her company. Scooter still climbs up on her pillow at night to knead her neck and give her a wet willie with his cold nose, and Boo still curls up right next to her and turns up her thermostat until she’s red-hot, but B seems to think the comfort of having the cats in bed with her is worth it. Oddly, Sparky does not feel the need to crawl into bed to join the party.

Just to see what this was like myself, I left the bedroom door open last weekend. I figured I wouldn’t lose any more sleep than I would when Scooter came scratching at the door, and if he planted his butt in my face, I’d just scoop him up and chuck him out. He’s got white fur; he’s not hard to find in the dark. To my amazement, I slept through the night. Best night of sleep I can remember having in a long time. When I mentioned this to My Darling B, she said something like, “Sure, ’cause Scooter and Boo were all over me all night.” I said we could go back to closing the door if she wanted. She said it was up to me, so I left the door open again, and again I slept through the night. *bliss!*

And they’ve been sleeping with us ever since. Sparky still doesn’t climb into bed with us. I’m still not sure why. He’s probably just used to sleeping on the sofa, but I get the feeling that if he ever does decide to join us and discovers just how warm it is, especially in winter, that’ll be the last time he sleeps alone.

scratch

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Okay, seriously, I’m begging you for suggestions here: How do I stop a cat from waking me up in the morning? I’ll try just about any non-lethal method you suggest that doesn’t involve broken bones or blood.

I thought I’d come up with a pretty good method myself: Feed them both just before bed and leave a bowl of kibble out for them. It’s worked so far, but they must’ve gotten awfully peckish last night because the bowl was empty when Boo-Boo got me out of bed this morning at four-thirty.

And before you ask: A twelve-pound cat can absolutely make a grown man get out of bed. If you don’t believe this, you’ve never tried to sleep in the same room with a cat who is determined to get you out of bed.

There’s no way to herd them out of the room when they wake me up; they just hide in a dark corner and wait for me to go put food in their bowls, so this morning I resorted to the old trick of getting out of bed and walking toward the kitchen. They go running past me when I’m about halfway across the living room, at which point I turn around and go back to bed, shutting the door behind me. That buys me about ten more minutes of sleep, maybe fifteen, until they start scratching on the door.

B wants me to throw them in the basement when they do that. It’d probably work, but it sounds about as easy as, well, herding cats. I want a method that doesn’t require much conscious thought or effort, because, remember, it’ll be about four o’clock in the morning and I’ll be hitting on three cylinders. Ideally, I’d like somebody or something to chase the cats out of the room for me, but I don’t see that happening unless I get a puppy.

sknxxx!

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

snore snoringIf you thought you heard someone snoring in your house last night, it was probably me. Even if there’s someone in your household who snores, my nose was stuffed up so badly that, more likely than not, I was overpowering them. My snoring was cranked up all the way to eleven last night. I’m pretty sure that astronauts on the space station woke up in the middle of the night wondering what that noise was.

I even woke myself up a couple times. The first time, at three o’clock, my nose was so stuffy I could hardly breathe and I laid there gasping like a fish for five minutes or so because I was too stubborn to get out of bed at that hour. I thought about trying to sleep sitting up in the recliner, but the bed was so warm and I didn’t want to get up, dammit! So I rolled over to the right and, about five minutes later, the left half of my sinuses cleared just enough to let me breathe. I must have fallen asleep shortly after, because I woke myself up again at around four.

OMFG more drivel about cats?

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Bonkers sucked all the heat out of his cat bed heater. I’m not sure how he did that. From what little I know about electricity and stuff, the juice is supposed to keep coming out of the wall socket for as long as I have the thing plugged in, but Bonkers seems to have violated the laws of physics, or overdrawn his electron account. The thing was nice and warm for a month or two, then it went stone cold.

Twice. He sucked the life out of the first one we got him and I wasn’t happy that he went back to sleeping on my head, so we got him another one and in just a couple months he killed that, too. Two heating pads were enough to get him almost all the way through the winter, though, with just a few weeks of chilly evenings when he would sneak into the bedroom early and curl up on Boo’s bed, which went on being warm. Sometimes she’d let him sleep on it all night but sometimes she wouldn’t. She probably knew he’d steal all heat from hers, too, if she didn’t chase him out of it.

When winter weather returned and Our Humble O’Bode began to get a little frosty around the edges at night, Bonk climbed right back into bed with us, having no warm bed of his own, and could not be persuaded to sleep anywhere else, not with a polite nudging, not by not-so-politely shoving him, not by picking him up and dropping him at the foot of the bed. He’d wait until we were settled and starting to drift off to sleep again, then tiptoe his way back up to his favorite spot between our shoulders and wedge himself there, stealing all the goddamn covers.

Until Tuesday when the new cat bed heater that I ordered after spending too many sleepless nights was waiting under the mailbox when we pulled into the driveway after work. I got a tingly feeling all over from opening that box. It was just like early Christmas. Couldn’t even wait until after dinner to unpack it and stuff it into Bonk’s cat bed. I wanted that thing toasty warm before the house started to cool off.

Worked like a charm. He was a little upset at first when I picked him up and plopped him in his cat bed. I suppose he assumed that, because it was not Boo’s bed, it was not going to be as warm as he expected it to be, but he caught on almost right away that things were different and was curled up like a big rollie-pollie soon enough. I made sure I got the king-sized bed warmer this time, big enough for a dog, really, so it should take him at least six months of round-the-clock cat naps to suck the life out of this one.

cat bed

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Okay, I’m up too early on a Saturday, but how else am I going to experience the maximum wonderfulness that is the weekend? A guy’s got to start early or he’s going to miss something.

And I owe my early rising once again to the cats, of course. The oldest one parked his fat blob of a butt right between my shoulder blades. Took him about ten minutes to do it, not because he’s a fat blob but because he’s always taken that long to find just the right position that will satisfy his feline needs, one of which must be to make sure I’m awake by the time he finally settles in and goes to sleep. Maybe there’s some kind of somnambulistic transfer going on there. I should contact the AMA and ask them to do a study.

He starts by slowly making his way to the upper end of the cleft in the bed covers between My Darling B’s shoulders and mine. I emphasize slowly. He moves like he’s stalking something. It’s very unnerving. Sometimes he’ll wait until I’m fast asleep and don’t even realize he’s there, but sometimes he can’t wait and begins his creepy crawl as I’m just beginning to doze. When I’m in between the land of the living and the near-death of sleep, nothing’s more unnerving than the realization that something is softly creeping toward my head. No matter how many times he’s done it already, I’ll still jerk awake the next time. He seems to take no small amount of pride in that. The little bastard’s probably keeping track on a scoreboard in his secret lair. “Scared the Human Awake for 1,736 days straight!”

When he finally arrives at the end of his slow-motion journey he picks his spot with great care, turning round and round, trying it with his nose in B’s face, then in mine. Or maybe he wants to park himself butt-first in my face tonight. It’s all relative, and every angle has to be evaluated. Sometimes he gets distracted by the need to noisily wash his face for way too long. That goes especially well for him when he can slop some drool on my forehead. I’ll bet the squishy old fur ball’s got a scoreboard for that, too. This stage of the process is done when he dumps all fourteen pounds of himself very suddenly on me. Ever been on a plane when the overhead compartment popped open and a carry-on bag fell into your lap? Me neither, but I imagine it’s kind of like that.

His collapse against my shoulders accomplishes two things: Wakes me up one more time with a firm punch, and steals even more of the bed covers than he already has up to then, exposing me to the chill of the night. This part’s actually not so bad, because it gives me a chance to give back a little of what I’ve been getting by grabbing the edge of the quilt and, with a quick jerk, launching him in B’s general direction. If he’s good with that, I can get back to sleep right away. If he’s not, he starts circling again, kneading his spot back into compliance, slobbering on his paws some more and, with a final flourish, punching me between the shoulders.

Sometimes this goes on all night, and then sometimes, like this morning, I just chuck it, get out of bed and spend way too much time wondering why we even have cats.

invasive brain-eating aliens

~ Dave O ~ 3 Comments

image of a pirate skeletonA 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.

batfatthat

~ Dave O ~ 2 Comments

image of clockCouldn’t sleep in this morning. I was trying, but when I crawled back into bed after a quick trip to the bathroom during the wee small hours, I heard a ticking or scratching sound, very faint but very persistent, in the bedroom. There was probably a mouse behind the book case or poking around in the closet, or maybe the house was settling. It was a pretty cold night.

But the noise was so annoying that, after ten minutes of listening to it, I sat up in bed to see if I could figure out which direction it was coming from. My attentiveness must’ve unnerved My Darling B. I thought she was asleep, but after I sat there for a minute she asked, “What?” in her wide-awake voice.

*tick*

“That.”

She paused, trying to decipher what I’d said, decided she couldn’t, and asked: “Bat?”

*tick*

“No, that.”

Pause. “Fat?”

“T, H, A, T: That. That ticking noise.” I laid back down and tried not to think about it. “Probably just the cat.”

*tick*

“Great,” she said. “Now I hear it.”

I gave up sleeping, got out of bed and went to the kitchen to brew a big pot o’ joe. Felt pretty bad about leaving her there to try to sleep through the ticking, but I didn’t know what I could do about it, other than lay there, wide awake, listening to it myself and getting more annoyed by the minute.

As I sat in my basement lair, doinking around with the internet, I heard her get out of bed and cross the living room. Obviously, she hadn’t been able to deal with the ticking noise any better than I had. I went upstairs to apologize.

She was waiting beside the kitchen table with one of my many clocks in her hand. “There’s your ticking noise,” she said, then headed off back to kick the cat out of the warm spot on her side of the bed.

There must be a word for the thought that gets stuck in your head and becomes so persistently annoying that it won’t let you sleep. Until I find out what it is, I’m going to call it batfatthat.

rough night

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

It was a dark and stormy night – “stormy” in the sense that there were many rumblings and flashes of activity. Somebody seemed to be having some trouble sleeping. Not me so much, but My Darling B was doing a lot of tossing and turning in the middle of the night. During the part of the night that I was awake for, she would do this thing where she would turn over, start to doze off, snort herself awake, turn over, start to doze off, snort herself awake again, turn over and so on. If I counted the bells of the clock in the front room right, I think I was awake for about an hour of that.

I don’t think she was doing that all night long. She seemed to be sleeping more or less soundly when my alarm went off. That’s perfect timing, eh?

With all that going on, I don’t remember having any dreams, oddly enough. Night before last, though, I dreamed I was trying to parallel park a Toyota Tundra in an underground parking garage where there was no room to turn around. The Tundra’s a honking big SUV with a turning radius of about ten miles. I wouldn’t take one into an underground parking lot, or ANY parking lot, for all the VW Beetles in Wolfsburg.

naked

~ Dave O ~ 1 Comment

Three o’clock in the morning, I woke from a dream in which I was the only person wearing clothes in a room with about a dozen naked people. It turned out to be more uncomfortable than the dream where I’m the only naked person. I didn’t know where to look. I didn’t feel like I could look at anybody, but whoever I talked to acted as though I was being stupid if I averted my eyes.

Awake, I blundered through the darkness to the bathroom to relieve myself. I had a bad case of gas but couldn’t fart it away no matter how long I lingered on the throne after I peed. When I started to doze off, I got up and stumbled back to the bedroom.

But with my head on a pillow again, I fell back into sleep and the naked people returned. It was so startling that I snapped awake. I rolled over and settled into another position because, you know, that chases the dreams away, right? Wrong. More naked people, and again I snapped awake. Reposition, doze, naked people, awake! Once, it was a room full of naked robots that looked like people, walking past me without saying anything. Between that and my grumbling tummy, I didn’t doze off again.

By the time the clock chimed the half-hour I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get any more shut-eye before sunrise, but I wouldn’t admit it to myself until after four, when I finally got out of bed and grabbed a book off my bedside stand. I read three chapters of The Cat From Hue, John Laurence’s memoir of reporting for CBS news during the Vietnam war, before I got up again at five and started the ritual of making the morning pot o’ java.

truckloads

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Woke up at about four o’clock this morning to a massive downpour, lots of thunder and lighting and cats walking across my face, not technically part of what one would normally consider a downpour but it was happening, so I note it. Okay, just one cat. The other cat was taking up all the space at the foot of the bed where my legs would normally go, so that I had to dangle my legs over the edge of the bed. I still don’t know why I unconsciously make room for the cat like that. It’s my damned bed.

Anyway, water was falling out of the sky by the truckload this morning. Why doesn’t anybody say that ever? Why buckets? Truckloads are way more impressive. They’re bigger, for a start, and they’re mechanized. Buckets are smaller and they’re a lot of work to carry around. Who likes buckets more than trucks? And I see trucks carrying water all the time. It’s not like they’re rare. From now on, I’m not saying rain came down in buckets. It comes down by the truckload. Who’s with me?