The Sleep Clinic
The woman at the reception desk looks more angry to be at work than I feel for being in South San Francisco on a drizzly March morning. She snaps at me when I don’t immediately present my Kaiser card when checking in, and knocks back a coffee that’s larger than the sodas you get at the movies. As she looks up my appointment details, I glance down at her desk. There is a small, golden, glittery pebble, with the word ‘breathe’ written on it in Comic Sans. I can’t attempt polite conversation now, I know too much about her. Briskly, she nods her head towards the Neurology Department, and I slink off, hoping the coffee helps her.
Dr Mahmood has a kind face. Which is what you want when you’re meeting a doctor who’s going to watch you sleep and take notes. His short, clipped beard is a dazzling white, and he sits just a little too close to me. For once, I don’t really mind. He is easy to trust, and encourages an openness that means within a few minutes of chatting I’ve told him some of the weirdest shit I think about.
To take a step back, I have sleep problems. Anyone who has had the unique pleasure of sharing a bed with me knows this. I snore. It is not charming. I act out my dreams, I sleep with my eyes open, I frequently wake in the night to talk to people who aren’t there. Sometimes, I wake into complete paralysis, in the midst of a nightmare. These are a monthly thing, some sort of demonic neurological period, where my mind decides to shed all of the cerebral curios it’s been collecting for the past 4 weeks and shoots it all out at once, leaving me lying perfectly still, unable to move, watching a demon creep towards me that is definitely going to kill me. I black out from fear and wake up with my heart rattling to get out, and pumped full of adrenaline and cortisol. Sometimes I leap out of bed and run to where I think the door is and smack into the wall. Often when I wake, I think I’ve awoken into death, and have to touch everything to make sure it’s real. It turns out, this isn’t how everyone sleeps?? WHO KNEW.
Dr Mahmood, that’s who. We glide through a checklist of night behaviours. Snoring? Check. Sleepwalking? Check. Hallucinations? Check. Sleep Paralysis? You betcha. Bed wetting? Thankfully not. We begin to build a picture. That these behaviors worsen in times of stress. That I struggle to get my head in order in the morning because it’s been up to so much in the night. As I reel off symptom after symptom, admitting that sometimes I don’t think the world we’re in right now is the correct one because my memories of the other place are so strong and I’ve watched The Matrix too much, Dr Mahmood’s face lights up. He is practically beaming by the end of our appointment, and visibly excited by the prospect of sending me to a sleep clinic. He asks “Why has it taken you so long to see a doctor?”, and I’m a bit embarrassed. Perhaps naively, I have always accepted my condition as a night weirdo as something perfectly normal and just a quirk. Even when I’ve woken up outside my home, with no keys or clothes. Or thought my sleeping friend was a cowboy and run into a wall. Turns out these are ‘incidents’.
I don’t think there’s really a cure for being a night time weirdo, but Dr Mahmood is sending me to a clinic in San Jose so I can be observed by doctors while I awkwardly sleep, so they can work out which breed I am. One of my coworkers hopes that there’s some sort of open gallery so that she can come and watch me wake myself up shouting “WHAT? You’re not the pope!!” before ripping the electrodes off my skin and bolting into a wall. Dr Mahmood was disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to attend my study personally, but gleefully informed me he’d watch the tapes anyway. He even thanked me for letting him participate in my care. It’s nice when your neurological tics are someone else’s pleasure.
I catch the train down to San Jose, and find myself wedged between identical tech men wearing Patagonia fleeces. A man with a pink mohawk sits opposite me, holding a flatulent pug that is wearing a company branded dog vest. I arrive at the hospital at 5pm, and am immediately whisked away to a strange corner where all the other night-weirds are gathered. There are millions of forms to fill out, questions to answer, and nodes to attach to my body and glue to my head. This is done by a weary nurse who asks if we can watch Jeopardy and is astonished that I’ve never seen it before. There are lots of questions about hydroponic farming which I’d been reading about earlier in the week, and she thinks I’m some sort of savant for getting all the answers right. It takes hours to hook up all of the many and varied cables, and I am told at 8pm that I must go to sleep. I lie awake until at least midnight, and have a fitful sleep in which I tangle myself in the wires so chaotically that I am woken twice to have them corrected. At 5am I am unceremoniously booted from the hospital, and return to San Francisco, bleary eyed and ravenous.
The results are quick: I do not have sleep apnea, nor any other identifiable sleep disorder. I’m just a bit of a dick in the night. It is clear that I rarely enter deep sleep, and sleep in a state of hyper-vigilance. I am told by Dr Mahmood that my problems are psychological, and that it is really only extensive therapy that may help quieten my traumatic nights. My husband expresses frustration that nothing can be done, and we return to fraught nights together.
If anything, things worsen. I start to have full panic attacks in my sleep, waking up soaked in sweat and wide eyed with terror. I believe I have been buried alive, and awake under soil, unable to breathe. He has no sympathy left, he is tired. A few more months passes, in this state of unease. And then the marriage collapses after an act of violence. He moves out, I begin to relearn how to sleep alone, and as I rebuild my life I begin to notice that I’m not having such intense nightmares. By this point I have an app that monitors my sleep, and the chaos it had previously recorded has quietened to just a simple snore. I realise with great and horrible sadness that I never felt safe sleeping next to him.
I met my partner a year or so after my marriage ended, and there was an immediate tenderness to our interactions. We went on four dates before we even kissed which is alien to me. The night we first shared a bed, we walked around San Francisco until three in the morning, talking and falling in love, sober and utterly entranced. We fell asleep holding each other, and it was the deepest and most restful sleep I have ever had. I still snore, some days more gently than others. But I sleep so deeply these days, and possess a peace that was always in me, I just didn’t know how to reach it. It is an absolute balm to be loved to safety, and to know that the night doesn’t need to be filled with demons.
