Sleepwalking? Sleepsleeping?

Life's getting weird...er than usual. I first blame the drugs. I think I'll call what's been going on "sleepwalking" even though no part of actual walking has been happening.

Think what that would be like to wake up to! OUCH!

I find myself over and over today coming abruptly out of a dream in the middle of an arm movement that would have put me directly into the action of the dream. It's never anything remarkable in itself. One or the other of us is handing something to the other one, say, or picking up or dropping off something. If it were real it'd be happening all though our dream lives. We don't think about it any more in our dreams or its lack. Our internal screen simply skips from scene to scene, from here to there to elsewhere, no passage of time, no logic.  We want to go somewhere, we simply shift to being there. Dreams simply don't take us through the motions so much as skip by them.

But one of the things we take for granted in REM sleep is the paralysis. Eyeballs roll and muscles may twitch. Arms don't move around: "Here, put this on that table." They just don't. Fortunately the very difference of having movement brings wakefulness. That very awareness of how weird the movement is becomes part of the experience. Waking-up me knows this just doesn't happen.

Except my arm is now in a position that shows it just did. It just grabbed something, caught something, placed something, felt something which doesn't exist. And as soon as it is over, I return to sleep knowing both that it has and will happen again.

Since I'm only aware of one sleepwalking episode in my life, about 60 years ago, I can't look back, take it apart, and examine the details. Thus I'm not even confident I'm supplying the right label here. But when there just has been motion, I don't know what else to call it.

Even "better" is when something else unusual happens. Because of the meds and the fairly constant napping through the days and nights, I've gotten used to  something of a pattern. None of those naps are very long. I know. I've been watching the clock each time the eyes open. I want to know whether it's time I can take another pill yet. Much as I do not wish to push the intervals shorter between pills because that's the beginning of a problem, neither do I want to stretch the timing out past the first available second where I could begin the process of pain relief for this next cycle.

Each interval lasts 4 hours.

I know just how little I sleep at a single time. Really, trust me on this. It can be very disappointing.
 It's dark, it's quiet, it's boring, and I can't get up and do anything about any of it. Not for, say, 47 minutes. Ummm, 46.  Ummm, 45. The ice is warmed but it's not worth the pain to get more. I kinda need to pee but it's not worth the effort to get out of bed when I will have to do it again in, ummm, 43 minutes now. Make that 42.

So I knew it was OK that both Steve and I relied on me to wake up in time for him to finish his nap, get dressed and off to eucher, because I'd be moving by then anyway.

Only I wasn't. His somewhat timely arrival at the club was only accomplished because we have our phones with us so I don't have to yell into another room and hope he'll hear it before I go hoarse. Cell calls penetrate. He was out of his bathroom and making his way down the hall to his shoes by the time I'd made it to my bedroom door on my way to my series of errands, including securing a pill (not for pain), fixing my supper, getting out a fresh ice pack, figuring out how I was going to get all of that plus two water bottles attached to something so I could haul them into the living room and still have a hand ready in time to hit the light switch there.

It all happened.

I'm going to assume Steve made his cards games, as he hasn't returned.

Once he does, we have another thing to put on the to-do list, in the area of things we now have to figure out how to accomplish, much less in a timely and pain free manner and without somebody skipping meals or meds. It's a routine that's no longer going to start with "depend on Heather to..."