Last month I went through a sleep study. This is something your doctor recommends if they suspect you might have insomnia, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, or any number of other sleepy time problems. My issues include awakening at random hours of the night, and then, when I do fall sleep, I narrate my dreams. While this last might sound interesting to those of you not in my bed, my husband will tell you that I’m a bore. It turns out that most of my nocturnal monologues consist of either low level mumbling, or sudden outbursts whereby I proclaim, “I’m asleep!” or “Wake me up!” A few weeks ago I spiced things up by simply yelling, “HEY!” at 2 a.m. My husband didn’t find this funny, but I did.

I have tried so many things over my lifetime to help me sleep I’m considering titling my next book Don’t Sleep. Here’s How. These include (but are not limited to) taking melatonin, Zyrtec, and Doxepin; counting backwards from 100 by threes; counting backwards from 100 by sevens; counting backwards from thirty while picturing writing each number incredibly slowly; counting backwards from thirty while picturing making an elaborate design of each number; saying the alphabet backwards; saying the alphabet backwards while picturing writing each letter incredibly slowly; and singing the alphabet backwards.

My most challenging nighttime achievement, however, and one which paid dividends in sleep until it didn’t, was learning to recite, from memory, the Pledge of Allegiance backwards. This required that I think it through a phrase at a time, then reverse it, and then string the reversed phrases together until I had the whole thing down pat. I spent so many nights teaching myself to do it (and, happily, falling asleep in the process), that I once awoke after a colonoscopy reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, prompting the attending nurse to remark how patriotic I was.

When math, the alphabet, and the Pledge of Allegiance failed me, there was my husband, always willing to tell me a sweet, silly, or hilarious bedtime story no matter the time of night. This helped me fall asleep for many years, until he became so burned out he put a moratorium on storytelling, plunging me back into insomnia and the hunt for new and complicated mathematical equations, recitations, and songs.

For all these reasons, and the fact that I had no answer to my doctor’s question, “Why can’t you sleep?” (“I’m too busy with computations and soliloquys” seemed not to be the right answer), I was referred for the sleep study. I got there on the appointed night at 8pm. The technician showed me to my room, which had been described to me beforehand as “just like a hotel room.” I was expecting a high bed with cottony sheets and an embarrassment of pillows, a bathroom with fluffy towels, a TV the size of a car, and maybe room service.

Just like a hotel room, there was a bed and a TV, but the bed was saggy and worn out and the TV was a relic. Unlike a hotel, there was a bathroom stocked with only paper towels, and the shower was off limits due to COVID (cleanliness presumably being a precursor of illness). Lurking in an upper corner of the room was a video camera aimed at the bed. I am hoping this is unlike any hotel room I have ever stayed in.

Within a few minutes, the technician had greased me up and affixed electrodes trailing long wires to my head, chest, and legs. She shoved a nasal canula up my nostrils, clamped a pulsometer to my finger, then gathered up the ends of all fifty or so wires and connected them to an electrical panel, which she slung, yoke-like, over the headboard. The she left me to strangle in the tangle of wires while I went on my nightly quest for sleep.

Hours passed. At 5 a.m., having dozed very little and sleep-yelled once, the tech came in again, removed the electrodes and wires, and sent me out into the brittle cold without so much as an offer of coffee. In the parking lot I saw another poor soul shuffling to his car wearing only pajamas and socks, and it briefly occurred to me he might be sleepwalking, soon to be sleep driving. Then I got into my freezing car and drove home and climbed into bed with my still-sleeping husband and two dogs and, in a stunning turn of events, slept.

I eagerly awaited the results from the study. I looked forward to finding out what, exactly had been making my sleep-brain go haywire since I was in my twenties, and what could set it right. My husband looked forward to the possibility of nights without theatrics. At last, the nurse practitioner called with my results. She said I have insomnia, and that I talk in my sleep.

I could have told her that myself, backwards.