What Are Normal Sleep Habits?

I knew it was going to be one of those weird sleep nights – while sitting in my much-too-comfortable bedroom chair I started to doze off around 9:30, WAY too early to turn in for the evening.

That of course led to a second wave of energy, which kicked my brain into high gear and didn’t allow me to crash until well past two in the morning.

My brain settled in, fittingly enough, on the topic of sleep, and all the different things I need and patterns I must follow to get a good night’s rest.

For starters, the room needs to be cool, if not cold, and I am not by any stretch of the imagination someone whose temperature runs high. But as Jim and the kids have thermostats set on nuclear, I’ve grown accustomed to sleeping with penguins dancing through our room.

If I do find myself sleeping in a warm room at someone else’s house or while traveling, I always sleep with a sheet or blanket pulled up all the way under my chin, as vampires will leave you alone if they do not have easy jugular access.

And then there’s the topic of body position: I always sleep on my right side, curled in the fetal position, because not a single body part can EVER hang off the side or end of the bed. Let’s face it, everyone knows zombies can’t grab you if your entire body is safely within the perimeter of the mattress top (I watched a lot of scary movies when I slept over at my grandparents’ house as a child).

I must always wear WHITE socks to bed. Seriously, one night I actually went down to the laundry room to pull a pair of white socks out of the dryer because my puffy purple socks were distracting me.

As Jordan, Jamie and I always sleep on the right side of the bed, if they crash in our bed during family movie night, I end up sleeping on the right side of THEIR beds, as I know better than to wake a sleeping Dralle child.

Another interesting nocturnal feature, Jamie sleepwalks into our bedroom at least once a week, eyes wide open and talking about something obtuse as he comes through our door. We’ve learned to simply walk him back to his bed, tuck him in, and he immediately drops back into a coma.

And as an added bonus, Jordan, Jamie and I talk incessantly in our sleep, and Jim snores, which now explains why our pets sleep so soundly during the day, because the house is so damn loud during the night.

All family pets generally end up trying to sleep in the master bedroom: Our dog who somehow still manages to jam himself under my side of the bed (next to the monsters), our elder cat who sleeps at the foot of the bed on my side, and our kitten who still enjoys sleeping on my head and fluffing my hair.

I used to enjoy falling asleep with the tv on, setting a timer to turn it off by a certain point in the morning, until I read this wasn’t a healthy way to allow the brain to relax prior to sleep. I also removed the actual alarm clock from my bedside, and now use my cell phone instead. This change now prevents me during insomnia periods from doing “sleep math,” i.e., “if I fall asleep within fifteen minutes, I’ll get a whole two hours of sleep before the alarm goes off.”

My eyes are finally getting heavy and it’s time to claim the right side of Jamie’s bed, as the little monkey konked-out in my spot hours ago. I place his dangling leg back on the bed, cover him and kiss him goodnight. One can never be too careful in the witching hour.