Trouble Sleeping

He had a habit of arguing in his sleep, suddenly shouting and swearing aggressively at imagined enemies. At night tucked up in bed with his wife, he would curse more vehemently than he ever did in his waking life. She often found his wildly colourful insults quite amusing really but at the same time was always disturbed by the violent nightly outbursts. It made her feel as though his ordinarily reasonable demeanour couldn’t be trusted. 

It was probably one amongst many reasons why he was now her ex husband. Rachel had a few of those, ex husbands that is, she was getting through them like they were going out of fashion. So far none of them had got past the seven year itch, but she was a hopeless romantic and fortunately for her also an eternal optimist. So, husband number three was angry dream man, not that he had ever lashed out at her during the night; nevertheless it was a clear sign of the unexpressed rage he was holding the lid down firmly on. During the day he was mild mannered but tense and controlling. His jaw was locked tight and she was sure he clenched his buttocks all day long.

In contrast her next husband had much more preferable sleeping habits. However stressed out or grumpy he might get during the day, at night, once he had been asleep about an hour; it was as if he were channelling Valentino himself. He would turn over and wrap his arms tight around her, pressing his body close to hers, moaning tenderly. It always woke her up and she would cuddle in to him, enjoying his warm sensuality. He would kiss her neck and whisper in her ear so amorously “I love you, darling, I love you so much”. His tone was always utterly passionate, so heartfelt. She would melt in his arms and feel like the luckiest woman in the world, so completely loved.

Come morning he had no memory of his ardent declarations of love. Rachel felt this was especially funny and poignant when they having a bad spell, arguing, and had gone to bed in a huff with each other. They would fall asleep both resolutely lying on their respective sides of the bed, a huge gap down the centre which represented their cold hostility, like the Berlin wall. Unbeknownst to him though, as soon as he had sufficiently drifted into sleep, he would be enfolding her in his loving arms. On waking, he would be back on his side of the bed, the wall rebuilt as if nothing had happened.

Sometimes when things weren’t going so well between them she would lie awake waiting until he turned to hold her, taking comfort in his embrace, so she could finally sleep. She had always found it hard to fall asleep when things weren’t harmonious. In Rachel’s experience, men seemed able to fall straight to sleep whatever was going on emotionally as if they were just happy to escape the drama of it all. But she would lie there for hours going over their argument in her head until it became unbearable and she would either have to get up or wake her lover up to try and get some sort of resolution. A word of advice at this point, waking your lover in the middle of the night to resolve your emotional drama is never, I repeat never, a good idea and rarely ends the way you’d like it to. 

As far as Rachel knew she herself didn’t have any strange sleep anomalies, but she wondered whether all men did. Her first husband had snored so loudly that it not only woke her constantly but also anyone else within a fifty yard radius. When they were first together in their late teens, Rachel had experienced the ultimate, mother of all, disturbed and sleepless nights. One night they had had a houseful, and at the end of the evening the last people standing were clearly far too inebriated to make their way home.

And so, five people and a dog had stumbled upstairs to get some shut eye in the two small bedrooms at the back of the house. Rachel and her husband Chris slept on a double mattress on the floor, his best friend Tim, fell into the bunk bed above them. In those days they didn’t think twice about all crashing out in the same room. Her two brothers in law, Jools and Sam, slept in the adjoining room and Sasha, Tim’s Alsatian dog, curled up on the floor next to the double mattress, "far too close for comfort" Rachel thought.

No sooner had Rachel started to drift off to sleep than the snoring began. Loud rasping, grunting snores that rumbled through the pillow Rachel had now clasped over her ears. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a few minutes later Tim had also begun to snore from overhead, it was just as incredulously loud too. Their snoring soon became perfectly synchronised so that as one of them exhaled the other breathed in a long resonant guttural growl of a snore. Taking turns, so that there was a constant roar driving Rachel to distraction.

Apparently, when her husband had been at college, his roommates had got so fed up of his boisterous snoring that they had decided to record it while he was sleeping. The next day they had played the recording over the campus tannoy, much to the amusement of the other students. His snoring was famous, although his fame was no comfort to Rachel at this moment.

Lying there wide awake, she became aware of her brother in law in the next room; he was tossing and turning in his bed. Each time he moved, his bed squeaked and he would mutter and groan, a low mumbling complaint, restless. Out of the blue a sharp shouted order broke through the baseline drone of snoring and mumbling “Left! Right!” “Salute!” “At ease men!”

Dear God! Rachel had almost forgotten Jools, he had a total obsession with all things military. He was in the cadets and was absolutely determined to join the army and become an officer. Unfortunately this never came to pass, which he blamed on the fact that he hadn’t had a public school education. Jools was never happier than when in his cadet uniform, shoes polished, his short black hair smoothed back with gel. If living, eating and breathing his passion for a military life wasn’t enough, he also dreamt of himself giving orders to his imaginary subordinates at night. 

Rachel groaned out loud, was there no mercy? No end to the cacophony of this preposterous sleeping ensemble? As if in response to her query, Rachel felt a wet slobbering lick on her right ear, a distinctly doggie lick. Clearly there was to be no let up, she decided that sleeping on the very uncomfortable sofa downstairs with no covers was a better option than staying another second in that room. It was like trying to sleep during a monkey’s tea party.

Yes, it is strange what we do in our sleep, Rachel’s mother in law had once told her that when Chris was a little boy he used to sleep walk and one night they had awoken to find the front door wide open and him nowhere in sight. He was only about five or six and he had wandered off down the street and was found about three hundred yards away sitting on the floor at some road works.

Rachel’s own parents had told her they had woken in the night once to find her standing on her bed aged four or five trying to hang an invisible dress on a nonexistent coat hanger above her bed. Yes’ a good night’s sleep is a rare and precious thing....