October 4, 2008
When and where do the boundaries between reality and dreams break down? How much of the waking world influences dreams and how much is it influenced by them? Is there a place where dreams meet reality and is it possible to stay for any length of time in such a place?
Last night I underwent a sleep study. Several weeks ago my nurse practitioner referred me to a sleep doctor based on some questions she had about my sleeping habits and certain lingering health issues that I have. More and more my sleep has become broken and unrestful. Even when it seems that I get a full night’s rest, I spend much of the day fighting fatigue and sleepiness… not to mention the Full Moon’s effect (but alas, that was a previous blog). I am even full back into exercising and working out… but to no avail.
So my sleep doctor prescribed for me a sleep study, to be monitored by electrodes on my body and by video. I arrived at the office at 8pm in my bed clothes (I actually sleep naked, mind you, so this was a bit different for me). The sleep technician was welcoming and led me to my room where I would spend the night. There was a big, fully made king size bed dominating the room that seemed inviting enough. There was some confusion about what kind of study I would be partaking in and he had to make a call to the doctor to sort it out.
It ended up that my insurance would only pay for a split study: half sleep analysis, half treatment analysis. The technician mused over it, saying it was the cheap way to go and proceeded to describe various study types and their associated costs between here and the Bay Area and abroad, chuckling and shaking his head to accentuate his point. That was when it struck me that we were the only two people in the office and that I did not know him at all.
He was a short, wiry man… balding, greased back hair with a sharp jaw line full of stubble. His nose was hawkish and his eyes were sharp, but tended to wander as he spoke. His facial expressions were exaggerated, almost comical, but equally unnerving. When he laughed, it made you laugh… but not because you necessarily wanted to, but because it seemed the wisest thing to do. Yeah.
The technician proceeded to show me a variety of positive air flow masks that were available for those with sleeping disorders. He showed me masks he could use, masks he wasn’t going to use, and finally settled on the one he would use. He told me he could tell the size of the mask to use just by looking at someone’s face. I wasn’t going to debate him on that.
Then he had me sit in a chair by the bed and laid out all the wires and tubes he was going to attach to me in order to conduct the sleep analysis. I found out that he had been a welder by profession just a year earlier. The shop closed down and a girl friend got him into this business. He described a number of odd tales concerning odd characters and incidents while conducting sleep studies, some his, some from this girl he knew. One notable one was about a guy who wore a diaper to the study and insisted that the female technician change it for him after he was wired up. Another was of a 95 year old woman who described rattlesnakes being tossed into the cabin of her Dad’s Model-T Ford by the spoke wheels while driving on the unpaved roads.
As he began fitting these electrodes and tubes to my legs, chest, throat, face, and scalp he told me of a lady that was coming in shortly for a similar study. At first I felt relief. Then, as he was working, he began describing his viewpoint of women, winking and nodding and chuckling as he did. It was fairly chauvinistic, bordering on misogynistic: how women were weaker, fussier, and always early. He broke in his subtle tirade to peer down the hall. Cryptically, he prophesized “anytime” as he stared blankly and motionless with his hands clutching the remaining wires he was going to attach to my skull.
Just then, the knock came and he snapped out of his trance. He smiled as he came back over to me and proclaimed “I must be psychic” as if it was just a dull common fact that barely warranted mention. He left to attend to the lady and I could hear him laying on the charm… not in a creepy way, necessarily, but in a way to put another person at ease. I started doubting my own perceptions. Was I reading too much into things? He soon returned.
Before he finished wiring me up, he pulled a thin black book from a cabinet and marveled at how he had found it the other day wrapped in plastic. The first page he showed me was an old, sepia-toned picture of a man in a medical room with a huge gash that passed through his entire right side rib cage back to front. Then he flipped the pages so I could see several other pictures: children wearing gas masks, soldiers, war decimated cities. It was a book on World War I. Then, as quickly as he brought it out, he snapped it shut and put it away without another word. He finished wiring me up, led me to bed, asked me to move certain parts of my body to calibrate the sensors, and turned off the lights.
I did my best to fall asleep, but as you can imagine it was a tad difficult, wires and all withstanding. My mind wandered. At one point I opened my eyes and saw a big black splotch on the ceiling. It followed wherever I moved my eyes. I thought I was awake, but I wasn’t certain. I closed my eyes again. Just when I thought I was never going to sleep, the door opened and a lady walked in with a lab coat on. She stood at the foot of the bed watching and smiling at me. There was a light illuminating her from below that cast crazy shadows about the room. I asked who she was and she said she was my sleep technician’s friend. Just then, my sleep technician came into the room and stood next to her. Both looked at me. Both smiled.
I awoke with a start and a shout. Nobody was there. I tossed and turned, sensitive to the glob of wires attached to me. Then I was at home and it was daytime. I was sitting on one side of my five piece sectional couch and the sleep technician was sitting on the other, smiling and looking at me. Where the couch curved there was a dark, lumpy spinning mass that seemed to float in and out of the couch. I asked the technician what it was. He told me to look closer. I moved in and saw that it was a spinning mass of bees, spiders, and other bugs. The technician told me not to worry, that it was contained.
The technician took me outside and we floated above a giant metropolis. It looked like New York, but it could have easily been any other major city. He told me that there were large colonies of bees and other insects living just below the surface of our world. And as he spoke it became apparent that the giant city was resting on a larger structure, a vast sprawling catacomb of bee cells… a giant honeycomb crawling with trillions upon trillions of bees.
Next we were standing at a computer workstation in a mall. I was completely wired up still and he was plugging those wires into the computer. He turned it on and proceeded to walk me through some test questions. After we finished, he gathered the wires and asked me to follow him, but mind the paint. I turned to see a barrier of stools before me with artist paint pallets place precariously upon them. Just beyond was a young actress lounging on a day bed flanked by a camera and lighting crew. She warned me to be careful as I crossed the paint pallet barrier… that she was trying to deliver her lines. I was successful at getting over, but got paint on my clothes and hands. The sleep technician proceeded to lead me through the mall holding my bundle of wires as I smeared paint on my face. He kept bobbing up and down like a hen, all googly eyed as pedestrians gawked at us like we were escaped madmen.
And then I was alone on top of some scaffolding overlooking a construction site. I had two childhood friends with me and we were wearing orange hard hats and vests. One of my friends looked at me and then jumped. His body hit the ground and moved no further… dead. The other friend looked at me and jumped. He ducked and rolled and looked up at me from the ground, waving.
I awoke to the technician entering the room. He had blue rubber gloves on. He wasn’t wearing them before. He removed the air tube from my nose and asked if I had to go to the bathroom. I was groggy. I told him that I should try. He unplugged the main bundle of wires and carried them with me to the bathroom. He left and I did my business. I gathered the cords and headed back to my room, where he helped me back to bed and plugged me back in. He fitted me with a positive air flow mask and left to complete the second half of the study.
The rest was uneventful. The technician woke me up at 7am. Apparently, the lady in the other room had already finished and left, if she had ever really been there at all. He removed the wires, talked about how the other patient’s long hair had been a hassle with the electrodes and glue. He described that out of the 7.5 hours that I was in bed, I was asleep for 4 of them…
I was awake for 3.5 of them…
He looked me in the eyes and said: “You were a good study.”
Then he saw me to the door and I drove home in the cold, wet morning of the previous night’s rain. Only now do I realize I had been in bed for 9 hours.
