Queries From a Sleeping Spouse

My wife is not a quiet sleeper. I don’t mean she snores like an exploding chainsaw — that was her father’s speciality — but she talks in her sleep, often loudly and quite suddenly. It never wakes her up. I’m not sure anything would wake her when she is in sleep-lecturing mode. But it always wakes me up because she doesn’t just talk in her sleep, she asks questions. If she was just making simple statements of fact, it would be easy to ignore them and go back to sleep. But she asks me things.

“When do we shave the cat?!?”

This sparks my brain to full cognition. Before I have a chance to explain to my brain that my wife doesn’t really need an answer to this question, it is running around in a panic going, “Oh My God! When DO we need to shave the cat?” And then it starts to come up with its own questions — questions like, “Do we even have a cat? I don’t remember us having a cat. Why would we need to shave it? Why is it dark? What time is it? Why did I marry this extremely strange woman?”

Then, once I’ve reassured my brain that, no, we don’t have a cat, and, yes, we do want to stay married to the woman sleeping beside us, I’ll just be drifting off again when, suddenly, like an angry school teacher, she will shout,

“Why did you put the peas in THERE?”

It’s not just my brain this time. My whole being is alive and alert. I feel instantly guilty because it is true, in the past, while unpacking groceries, I may have put an item or two in the wrong place. Light bulbs in the fridge. Chocolate in my belly. Had I done it again? Where did I put the peas? When did I put the peas? Unlike the cat, I was pretty sure we did actually have peas and putting them somewhere was a normal thing to do. Does she really need the peas? I nudge my wife and ask, “What did you say? Do you need peas for something?”

“Traffic jam toothpaste,” she replies and rolls over on her side.

I sigh. As does my brain. We both roll over on our side and try to get back to sleep. It’s hard, though. I can’t stop worrying about the peas and where I might have put them. And just when I finally relax about the peas, I start worrying about the cat and whether it needs to be shaved.

The next morning my wife has no memory of asking me anything. She thinks I’m making it all up. But I am not.

I think the problem is that she is an academic. Her thirst for knowledge knows no bounds. It literally never sleeps. Her day job is coming up with extremely complicated questions based on years of research. And so, when she’s relaxing, she just asks any old garbage. Other people would dream of fluffy sheep or planet-sized tubs of cookie dough. But even when she’s relaxing, she is on a quest for knowledge. But because she’s asleep, she doesn’t put the work in. There is no scientific rigour in her sleep investigations. Her brain is just filling in forms. Start with an interrogative, follow it with a verb and a noun. Stick a question at the end. Job done. It doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to demand an answer.

I’ve come to accept this and accept my part in supporting her scholarly pursuits. I’m okay with missing out on a little sleep if one of the great scholars of our age doesn’t have to worry about frozen vegetables in the bookcase or non-existent cats needing a haircut.

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An earlier version of this post was published on Medium.com.