NIGHT MOVES

Girls, you know what I am talking about. Those unpredictable things that your husband does in the middle of the night. Those times when he gets inspired and he tries something new. Something unconventional, something out of left field. You lay awake after it happens and wonder who he really is. You wish you had somehow documented it so you could show it to him as proof in the morning. How can anyone, while fully asleep, do the things that he can do? It’s like you don’t even know him. Those are his night moves, ladies.

In Barry’s case, snoring is just the tip of the iceberg in his litany of night moves. This has been a marriage long (23 year) battle for us. What Barry can accomplish in the name of “snoring” seems to me to be an entirely different category. I have video taped him in the dark so that I could prove to him the next morning that he becomes some kind of fire breathing dragon in his sleep.  The bed shakes. His face looks like it is going to implode. I witness the whole thing, shocked that it is possible to “sleep” while this is taking place. Don’t bother sending me your suggestions. The only one I haven’t tried is “smother him with a pillow.” He has the mouthguard. He has had the surgery for a deflected septum. When he was tested for a CPAP, I think his results came in something like, “dies 14 times in the middle of the night”. This machine is the only thing that keeps him from snoring and dying 14 times/night. I love Barry and I just can’t require him to hook himself up to a Darth Vader-scuba mask to sleep every night of his life so there are several nights a week that I just have to deal. I have employed several different techniques to stop the snoring when I am desperate. Ear plugs, white noise machines, getting to bed way before him, hoisting open his nasal canals with breathe right strips. I clap loudly to covertly startle him out of a rip roarer. I cough. I tap him with my foot. Then later I kick him. I gather my pillows and march loudly out of the room. Nothing shakes him. He sleeps on another level of unconsciousness and snoring is only one of his night moves.

Another one of his night moves is throwing things. Yes, that’s what I said, he throws things. When he was younger and still living at home, while fast asleep, he would reach out and grab whatever his hand could find on the bedside table and fire it like Nolan Ryan fastball across the room. One night the lamp went for a ride. The next night the lamp was utterly destroyed. The next night the clock. The next night, his Bible. After that he just didn’t allow himself anything on his bedside table, for safety’s sake. The funny thing is that he was never really aware of the sleep-tossing when it was happening. Sometimes he would have a vague recollection of something rolling off the ends of his fingers like a perfect 3 point shot, followed by a crash a long time later, but he would never wake up. I know there is such a thing a sleepwalking, but is there such a thing as sleep pitching? Yes, yes there is, it’s one of my husband’s night moves.

He has also worked conversation into his night moves tool belt. He makes bizarre statements, he asks weird, non-reality questions and rehashes work issues out loud in the night. I try to answer him and ask him some leading questions just so that I can at least have some fun if I am going to be woken up by sleep talker. I usually quote the outlandish conversations to him the next morning, just to help him understand how crazy he is.

Once, in a hotel in Louisiana somewhere, he put all of these fun sleep disturbances together into one cool performance. I was pregnant and relished the chance to be in my own bed, so he was on one queen bed and I was on the other. We had been asleep for about an hour when he sat straight up in bed, grabbed the phone off of the receiver and answered it (it had not rung.) “Hello, hello, hello??” he said, and by then he had my attention. I rolled over to see what was going on just in time to see him launch that phone across the room like Michael Irvin was waiting for the pass. It was on one of those long, coiled cords and it boomeranged back at us at lightning speed and just missed my head. What the heck?!? I pulled the covers up to my eyeballs, truly frightened. I waited, scared to see what was going to happen next but within thirty seconds, he was sawing his proverbial logs with great vigor again. I was stunned that this level of activity could be produced by someone who was indeed…asleep. I emerged from my duck and cover and put the phone back on it’s cradle. I laid awake for another hour wondering if Barry was a spy, living the life of an itinerant musician. Sigh, night moves.

The outburst of this next variety of night move has only happened once, but it was a doozy. Apparently, Barry was having a really involved love dream. (I hope I was in it.)  Things must have been heating up pretty good because all of a sudden, I started getting bumped/humped/what-have-you with notable force. I was confused by this sudden, aggressive advance and had made up my mind to rebuff it when he bumped/humped me so hard that I fell off my end of the bed. I sat on the floor for a minute, waiting for an apology but all I got was the sweet sound of my fire breathing dragon, doing his best imitation of a freight train. To this day, he refuses to believe that this happened but seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

Does your significant other live a whole ‘nother life in their sleep, like mine? It’s fun, isn’t it? For me, it makes going to sleep a fun adventure, like buying a ticket to “Barry’s House Of Sleeping Fun.”  I would love to hear about the night moves that you are subject to. Please, it might help me feel less like Barry is a spy.