I’ll level with you: every month around this time I sit down in front of my computer, stare at the ceiling, pray that a new blog topic will fall out of the sky and hit me upside the head. And of course, to nobody’s surprise, nothing falls out of the sky. Instead, I end up curled up on the side of my bed, sleep mask on, napping my workday away. The perks and perils of being your own boss, I guess.
Except this week, when, in the midst of avoiding this blog by taking a nap, I was woken up by my partner, also asleep (we’re a sleepy bunch), and groaning like some horror movie ghoul halfway through being exorcised. If you’ve ever been with someone who occasionally sleep talks, you know it can be equal parts frightening and funny; mostly it’s just annoying. On a weekday nap or at 3am, I end up frantically googling how to shut my partner up. Throwing a silk sleep mask over his mouth feels like a suffocation risk. Spraying him with a sleep mist just makes his nose twitch. So I just wake him up. There’s no way he’s sleeping well under all that groaning, right?
You can imagine the sound I let out when, after hours of googling, I did find that apparently, I was (am) the only one with a problem. Most studies show that, unless something else is going on as well, sleep talking alone is more of a “sleep quirk” than a genuine disturbance. In fact if anyone has a disturbance, it’s me.
I started writing this blog, hoping to maybe make a list like “5 Ways to Stop Your Partner’s Sleep Talking,” but it would seem that our Chatty-Cathy partner’s aren’t the one’s with a problem. So next month, when I come back to this desk, struggle to put my fingers to the keyboard, and inevitably end up taking a nap instead, I will be doing so sleep-mask on, ears plugged, fast asleep, for the time being at least.