To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
When Shakespeare has Hamlet ponder this thought, it is a follow-on to the famous “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Shakespeare is as heralded a poet as he is because he does, indeed, ponder the imponderable thoughts we all have on any given day. “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles.” It is as fundamental an aspect of human or mammalian nature as fight or flight. But it is also so much more in that it overlays the cerebellum on top of the cerebral cortex knee-jerk reaction of the moment. In many ways, this Shakespearian quote is the essence of humankind. What separates us from the animals is that we have the ability to ponder the choices of life and death in the context of life being the bitch that it sometimes feels itself to be.
Take this morning for example, I have been awoken on a “vacation” Saturday morning at 5:44am. That is approximately 6.5 hours of sleep, which under normal circumstances is a pretty decent night’s sleep. My sleep app gives me a 100% if I get 7 hours and 6.5 hours gets me a score of about 96%, which, based on my school years of grading, feels like more a victory than a defeat. But I have awoken at this early hour for several reasons which I think are worthy of exploration.
To begin with, my CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machine, with which I have slept for the past twenty-six years, was being noisy. CPAP’s have come a very long way in 26 years. They used to be big and clunky, noisy and inflexible, and now they are much less so. To begin with, they all start automatically when you put on the face or nose mask (there are literally thousands of varieties of masks to suit all preferences) and they do so gradually to allow you to adjust as you fall asleep. They have become quite quiet and even have humidity adjusting capability. I’m old school and don’t use humidity adjustment, mostly because it involves distilled water, which is a pain, and I’m simply used to it dry as an early CPAP adopter that’s had lots of time to adjust. Once you are hooked on a CPAP (mine was for snoring, but who knows, I might have Apnea as well now….in either case I will always use a CPAP) it’s hard to sleep without one beyond perhaps an hour-long nap. When I travel, I have to take a travel CPAP. They too have improved and gotten much smaller and easier to set up nightly. They have included all the features of the new larger models except the latest version just isn’t as quiet as it’s big brother. That can occasionally deter me from falling asleep, but my weakness is more on the staying asleep side of the equation. Sure enough, I awake after getting a generous 6.5 hours last night due to my noisy CPAP.
The second reason why I wake up early is some combination of hip, back or knee soreness, either from sleeping too long on my left side or defaulting to my back (always tough on the lumbar regions). The older I get, the more stiff I get from a night’s sleep. I now judge a bed by its softness much more so than its firmness. Any hosts that invite me to stay st their home can be my eternal friend by making sure there is added pillow-top on their guest room bed. Hotel beds range from great to OK, but they have clearly undergone a very positive transformation of late. I cannot claim that I was unduly sore last night or that the bed was too hard. I would say that on my motorcycle rides I am much more muscle sore and a nice comfy car ride is not muscle strain inducing.
The other reason I wake up early is when I have something troubling me or on my mind. I don’t want to jinx myself, but I have no real worries right now (more on that in a moment). My company is funded for a while. My expert witness business is fine (more on that too). The home projects are under control and close to completion. But today is Saturday and I always generate a weekly CEO update on the business. I had a morning call with NYC on a new expert assignment. I needed to prepare for an arbitration testimony next week while still on the road (an annoyance, but workable). I would rate the “Things on my mind” factor as about an 8 out of 10. So I am going to opine that my early rising was 70% due to the CPAP, 25% due to shit on my mind and 5% due to general driving fatigue and soreness.
None of this stacks up to Hamlet’s problems and does not even begin to cause me to wonder if it’s all worth it. I have little understanding about that level of negative brain chemistry. I have excess serotonin and it peaks first thing in the morning. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some big troubles in my time, and I’ve even been forced to take sleeping pills for a few months once thirteen years ago. But I’ve never considered the troubles to tip the scales to the point of saying that the outrageous fortune overwhelms my desire to be. Maybe I’ve been lucky, but I suspect that desperation might have come to others in my shoes to greater proportions. I give lots of credit to my overnight serotonin production.
Even with today’s line-up of issues, just showing-up put me in a better place. My expert testimony for next week got postponed a week, so that took pressure off the vacation road trip schedule. The other new expert witness call went well enough that I was given the assignment (which will keep me busy for August at my full top rate). The case also sounds interesting to me. The weekly update got written easily enough in the time I had due to rising early. And then, during the day, I learned that one big project planned for late next week (the infamous Shadesail) got finished early today. That could have conflicted with the roofers doing the garage roof, but I learned they had finished demo of that roof and positioning all the new materials yesterday. That meant there would be no conflict. All was not just well with the world today, it was better than that and rising early may well have helped that outcome.
We spent the day driving up the Oregon Coast from Coos Bay to Astoria. On the map, this was a mere 200 miles, but the natural beauty of the drive combined with the small winding coastal roads made it take the full day. We are now at the mouth of the Columbia River, the place where Lewis and Clark (not to mention Sacagawea) ended their discovery trek west to the Pacific. Here we are complaining at dinner (a lovely meal outdoors for social-distancing on the River) about our long 6.5 hour driving day, when those Nineteenth Century adventurers had spent eighteen months to walk and canoe 4,000 miles. At least tonight is Saturday, which means absolutely the only thing on my mind is to sleep, perchance to dream.