I’m staying at the Wakefield Holiday Inn Express tonight, not because Wakefield is so far outside of Raleigh that it requires an overnight stay (though sometimes it seems that way) but because I’m having yet another sleep study done. I figured I needed to see what’s been going on with my patterns of bad night/good night of sleeping.
The last study I did was five years ago, my blog tells me. I remember writing a much longer post than the one that’s present here. Must’ve fallen asleep while I was writing it. Or saving it. Or something.
For the study, I get hooked up to 22 different wires which record my brain and body activity. An infrared light illuminates me for a night-vision camera, which provides a video accompaniment to the streams of data being collected. I try to fall asleep knowing my every move is being scrutinized and spend a frustrating night wide awake until 20 minutes before its time to leave, at which point I slumber deeply. The smiling techs then tell me I sleep just fine as they shoo me out the door.
Being that this study is in a hotel room I hope to sleep better. I’ve gotten used lately to sleeping in hotel rooms, cameras or no cameras, while a room in a sleep lab is still too weird for my liking. In fact, a hotel room is the closet thing to my natural habitat as my own bedroom.
Hopefully I won’t remember a thing but sweet dreams upon awakening in the morning.