My Husband, the Somnabulistic Acrobat and Linguist

Marriage has made clear that Sleeping Josh and Sleeping Ann Marie are complete foils to Awake Josh and Awake Ann Marie. Whilst awake, Josh is both physically and vocally relaxed; he doesn't fidget much, he never babbles. I am someone who has never been able to keep still since the moment I burst forth upon the world. I fidget and wiggle habitually; I chatter at trifles.

This contrast between our two modes of movement was made clear the first time Josh took me on a date to the movies. He sat like a rock for two hours, blinking occasionally. I shifted positions about every thirty seconds--left leg crossed over right; then right over left, then slumped a bit in the chair, then cross-legged, then knees pulled up against my chest, then one ankle under my bum, then repeat the whole experience (for two hours). (For clarification, the movie was Terminator Salvation. One possible explanation for my lack of movement may have been because I was paralyzed with disappointment.)

Sleeping, however, is an entirely different story. I sleep like the Bride of Dracula--immobile, flat on my back, with my hands crossed over my heart (a little creepy, I know, but it's realy quite comfortable). Over the Christmas holidays I spent a night apart from Josh while he was visiting his family in North Carolina. I lay down on my side of the bed, leaving his side smooth and unruffled. I awoke eight hours later in precisely the same position, with nary a wrinkle on the covers.

Josh sleeps like a circus troupe. He moves, flails, rolls, twitches, murmurs, talks, and advances across the bed like the Romans across Europe, leaving me squished behind a fragile Hadrian's Wall at the edge of the mattress. The other night I awoke (lying flat on my back, of course, only taking up as much space as the width of my body) to find that at least 3/4 of my pillow had been commandeered by a tousled pile of mighty black hair (and its slumbering owner). It took more than gentle remonstrating to get him to a conscious enough state to roll back to his side of the bed.

My favorite moments, however, are the strange verbal explosions. Josh's capacity for speaking gibberish (or Ewokese) has been well-documented, and I can testify that he reverts back to his language of yesteryear when sleeping. Once, while waking up from a three-hour nap on the couch, he exclaimed, "Is that you, Mama?" (I wasn't sure how to take that one . . .) And then one night several weeks ago, I awoke to some thrashings and mutterings. Josh was lying on his back, with both hands behind his head. He was jerking from side to side, jabbering with each turn. I couldn't make out a word of the babble, until he suddenly burst out with this: "I'm really getting to have a great voice for radio."

I chuckled, scribbled it down, and resumed my creepy vampire pose whilst my DJ of Dreams somersaulted on to somnabulistic bliss.

*****

JD here. I'm not surprised AM resorted to the banal, Western-oriented Roman analogy about me "invading" her side of the bed, but I think a more accurate metaphor in this case, given my Asian makeup, would either be Genghis Khan sweeping across the steppes of central Asia; or, for extra credit points in proper use of metaphors, Imperial Japan bringing the Pacific into what they called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But whatever. Who am I to critique?

To compliment AM on what she portrayed accurately, describing her sleeping "mannerisms" (if you can call complete inactivity a mannerism) as being like Dracula's Betrothed was spot-on. And creepy. Hence why I stow cloves of garlic stowed under my pillow. And why I sleep with a sharpened, wooden stake in one hand; gun with chambered silver bullet in the other (wait... I believe I am muddling monsters here. Well, you can never be too safe when you think your wife is about to plunge her incisors into your neck and make you part of the Walking Dead at any moment. But I digress.)

I take pride in my active yet nocturnal and unconscious lifestyle. I'll have to share about the one time, while sleeping, that I jumped off the top bunk of a set of bunk beds and landed on my feet. LIKE A CAT.