1.14.2003 Sleep Activity
The other night, it all started like a dream, “Peter…” the voice appeared again. “…Peter.”
“Yeah?” I answered up to the sky.
“How are you?”
“I’m alright.”
“I know it’s been a while since we last talked. I missed you…”
The conversation went on for a while. I took my place on the lush green landscape in my dream and continued onward. At times, the conversation grew intense and stressful, and at other times, it lightened up.
It was the strange dream, but at the same time, all too familiar.
Elizabeth is pretty cool—I would have to say. I know that she’s my wife and all, and all that mushy stuff, but she’s also a great friend. I mean our relationship is a pretty unique one where we are husband and wife, foremost, but also each other’s friends. And this is usually really cool.
And alike being friends, sometimes, its sort of weird when you find out something about the other person that you’ve never realized before. And, I’m not really sure how long this has been going on, but I realized recently one of the weirdest things.
Well, okay, it’s not all that weird, but sort of freaky though.
As you already knew, Elizabeth works nights. She gets two nights off a week and the time spent together is sometimes odd due to our opposite schedules—there is a point in time while she is awake while I am sleeping and vice versa. The in-between times while we both are awake, or the intersection (for our mathematically inclined individuals), is usually when we get to do things together, instead of just watching each other sleep.
Little did I know though, was that we have learned to have activities with each other during the other times, while the other person was asleep. Mine, I would have to say, is not all that weird. Well, of course I would have to say that for it’s my activity with Elizabeth and I can understand the full motivation behind it. To satisfy curiosities, I guess I can explain it here—I usually sit next to her while she sleeps and play on the laptop (this is how things started). But, since I got the new Palm Pilot, it has this nifty feature of being a voice recorder; I started taking sound samples of her sleeping sounds. Then, I experiment by playing them back to her while she sleeps and observing how she reacts. One would think that this has no effect, but the results are sometimes surprising—she acts as though there’s a second person there. Sometimes, she may even adopt the breathing pattern as the recorded one. I know this seems sort of lame, but honestly, this is sort of interesting.
I mean, what else is there to do? Okay, don’t answer that.
Then, I come to find out that she has her own strange “together” time with me also. Sometimes, I wake feeling not so refreshed, and sometimes somewhat drained—not physically, but mentally, as though I had been doing a lot of thinking (note—this would be contradictory from the beneficial effects of sleep).
Last night, it happened again and I remembered a bit of the conversation, and it sort of stayed with me the whole day. I sort of remembered it earlier and decided to ask Elizabeth about it. Apparently, as it turns out, she was the one who has been conversing with me all along. She notes that I don’t always talk back to her, usually I listen, but there are times that I do talk.
I guess this gives a different meaning to “making the most out of your time”.