Stages of Sleep

Stages of Sleep

We all know that there are stages to sleep.  You have to cycle through the first few to get to the heavy-duty REM sleep, which is that blissful state where you are totally relaxed and sleeping deeply.

My sleep patterns are slightly different.

Stage 1:  I fall asleep – eventually, generally in bed, drifting off with the TV on, or after reading a few pages of a book.  This usually takes a fair amount of time, even if I am really tired.  If I am too wound up (as I always am after a Rutgers Women’s Basketball game – win or lose), I can’t fall asleep.  I play mind games, trying to recall all of the players on the 1961 New York Yankees, for example.  I know that telling yourself NOT to think is the best advice, but my switch is lodged permanently in the “on” position.

Stage 2:  Impossible, of course, without Stage 1, but I will be comfortably asleep until around 4 AM, when I wake up and have the nightly debate over whether I am awake because I have to go to the bathroom or whether, since I am awake, I should just get up and go to the bathroom.  There are compelling arguments to be made by each side in this negotiation.  I should just automatically get up and go before the discourse rages within me.  Typically, the getting up option is triumphant, so I take care of business and crawl back into bed, only to be wide awake.  Again, the names and uniform numbers of the Yankees, or the names of magazines swirl around to distract me.  Often the TV goes on again.  I’ll watch “House Hunters” in the middle of the night and fall asleep just as the homeowners are about to reveal their preference. Then I wake up, rewind and start the process over, minus the Yankee roster.

Stage 3:  I’m awake again, having seen the 6^th airing of ESPN’s SportsCenter, but I am groggy enough not to know who beat whom.  So now the big decision is where to sleep.  I live alone, so this is a multiple choice question.  In the winter, I like to be bundled up under the covers, but in the summer, I will often flip to the end of the bed, with only a throw blanket on me.  I feel like sleeping on my side, but then my shoulders get sore, so I get on my stomach instead of the original sleeping on my back position, and settle in, asking myself, “Is this a sleeping position?”  If the position is only to allow me to get a better view of the TV, that’s not really accomplishing my goal.  There is yet another option.  I could always sleep in the recliner.  I have one downstairs in my family room and its exact twin resides in my bedroom.  Since I seem to fall asleep quite easily in the chair downstairs, I figure that maybe I can slip into that REM upstairs, too.  Sometimes this works, maybe because by now all of the debating has worn me out – which should help put me to sleep.  At least living alone means I am not disturbing anyone else’s sleep.  There is a chance I inherited this problem from my father, who apparently was all over his bed.  My mother, the late, great Sylvia Gordon, used to say to him the next morning in her inimitable style, “Lester, you were flipping around like a flounder in that bed last night.” 

I have to admit castigating myself for all of this thought processing, and for having no problem whatsoever falling asleep at inappropriate times and places.  Put me in a classroom or at a lecture where I am extremely interested in the subject and I will fall asleep.  On a plane, unless someone is bumping into me as they go down the aisle, I will typically put on headphones, listen to relaxing classical music and fall asleep.  I inevitably fall asleep if I am watching the movie on the plane.  Once, before the movie started and before we even took off, I fell asleep.  Do you suppose anyone would object to my sitting on an airplane at night by myself, just to get some shuteye?

Then there is my penchant for falling asleep at the movies on the ground.  When I watched “The Aviator,” I wondered why I never saw Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn.  Later I realized I had slept through that part.  In the movie “Doubt,” just at the critical moment when Meryl Streep confronts the priest about molesting the students in the Catholic school they run, I fell asleep.  I had my own bout of doubt as a result.  I have also fallen asleep on a tour bus in Paris, at plays – and I mean musicals, not just stage plays – and watching TV with friends.  But in my special “Heavenly Bed?”  No such luck. 

I’ve tried it all.  I have a sound machine, but it seems too loud.  That’s odd, considering that ESPN is pretty loud when they are showing some highlight, and yet that doesn’t help, either.  I have some medication I can take, but if you wake up in the middle of the night, you don’t want to take anything that will make you drowsy all day.

And then there is the dream aspect of sleeping.  How many times I have awakened from a bad dream and have been afraid to go back to sleep for fear of continuing that dream?  (PS – That never happens.)  On the flip side, I’ll awake from having a great dream and try to get back to sleep so I can see how it ends.  Forget it.  Once I wake up, it’s over.  And so is my sleep.

I know this is not just my problem.  How many times have I talked to friends who lament the same pattern:  “I was up at 4 this morning,” one will say.

“You should have called,” I’ll reply.  “I was awake.”

Back when I worked, setting the alarm was obligatory.  Now, I set it but I am almost always up long before it goes off.  And who among us hasn’t noticed that when we know we MUST get up, we could sleep all day, but when you have the day off, you are up at the crack of dawn?

I’ve been playing Words With Friends lately, and normally I check to see if my opponents have taken their turns when I get out of bed.  One morning around 4 AM I was wide awake and turned on my phone.  I noticed that a friend of mine had played, so I took my turn.  Almost immediately I got a message from her:  “Can’t sleep?”

Join the club.