When our oldest was 11, she started sleeping with a fan trained on her.
Winter and summer.
And not just any fan but a fan so big you thought you were on the runway at JFK Airport.
She couldn’t sleep without it, she said.
“How are we going to marry this one off?” her dad groaned one night.
“Well, maybe we all need help dropping out of consciousness,” I said and hasn’t that answer come back to haunt me, since I, too, now sleep with a fan 12 inches from my face.
It’s part of the night-time bag of tricks I keep handy. And so what if keeping a wind-producing engine so close your head looks like a chicken’s fanny in the wind? If it helps quiet the mind, that is.
Thus our subject for today: Improved Sleep: the third leg of my Three-Legged Stool of Resolution for 2010.
Let’s start with the rules the sleep experts are always trotting out, rules like:
One, Darken the Room You Hope to Sleep In: But who doesn’t love to see the sky? I open the curtains after I turn out the lights. Some nights the moonlight’s so strong you could shave your legs by it.
Two, No TV in The Room: But I first hauled a TV up into our room during the fall of the Bicentennial Year when I was pregnant with Fan Baby. In fact, whenever I think of the groundbreaking series “Roots” I think of our bed in 1977’s first weeks, a nest of burp cloths, diaper-cream tubes and bits of Minute Rice, remnants of the many dinners we ate over her snoozing noggin.
Three, No Using the Bed for Non-Bed Things. I polished my shoes in the bed just last week. I used to pay the bills in bed, but I had to stop. I kept falling asleep while signing the checks - it looked like I’d been shot mid-transaction – only to startle awake an hour later and be totally unable to find the furry path back to oblivion.
The good news is even if you too break all the rules, there are still things you can still do help you sleep:
One, scoot down in the bed, hook your toes over the edge of the mattress, and stretch upwards as far as you can, pretending you’re 7 feet tall and in the NBA.
