The rigors of sleep. (In real life: first-person America).(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, NEW YORK--Mid-life hits everyone with a different set of blues. Some people lament a departed waist and the arrival of its surrogate, a pair of well defined love handles. Others have to contend with mate separation, empty nest syndrome, imminent retirement, or the almost universal disillusionments about one's self, partner, child, parent, or general lot in life.

In my case, sleep became the battleground for working out my problems. Then, perversely, sleep itself became my biggest problem.

Somewhere around age 50, I began to perform the following activities while asleep: snore, grind my teeth, tense my shoulders, stiffen my neck, shorten my spine, cramp my feet, inflame my sweat glands, provoke my bladder, and wrestle with my pillow. These exercises left me putty-faced and deeply creviced every morning. And that was just the physical part. Always prone to nightmares, I found that as soon as I shut my eyes I was losing teeth, being abandoned in lunar landscapes, running from serial killers, and constantly making heart-stopping mistakes like leaving my daughter in her highchair while I went skiing for the weekend.

Rather than embracing the arms of Morpheus, I seemed to be cross-channeling into the Labors of Sisyphus and exhausting my body in the very act of rest. The paradox was that I had no trouble falling asleep, or even staying asleep for several hours. But the longer I slept, the more fatigued I would feel. I looked forward to wakefulness as surcease from labor. I couldn't wait to jump out of bed before dawn for a relaxing round of housework.

My husband was a bad sleeper too and I began to wonder if our bedroom had unwholesome vibes. Sheepishly, I began asking others about their sleep habits. That's when I discovered that there are hordes of people out there who are sleep sufferers. In addition to all of my own symptoms I was hearing about dry mouths and throats, nasal congestion, itchy bodies, neurasthenic feet, acid reflux, and inordinate hunger pains. Perhaps sleeplessness is the body's quest for relief from these rigors.

Or perhaps the problem lies in our expectations. Programmed to believe that we all should be ...