The Sleep Mask

In collaboration with our friends at Objet: We’ve asked five writers to write about a single object that is significant to them. You can now read all previous entries in the series:

• Marlowe Granados on her Bakelite bag

• Michelle Santiago Cortés on her Sanrio machete

• Akosua T. Adasi on her milk pan

• Amelia K. on her fox skull

Objet embeds memories into clothing via regular soirées—parties with a French touch—where they invite local tailors to customize your favorite garments. Imagine that piece now, carrying your best moments into the next century. Sign up to hear about the next soirée.

Our final OBJET dispatch is Erin Somers on sleepwalking, surveillance delusions, and the anxieties of adulthood.

Almost every night for a year now, I’ve followed the same routine. I take five milligrams of melatonin, put my phone across the room, read for a while or watch part of a movie with my husband, then turn off my light between 10:30 and 11:00. An hour later, I get up again, but this time I’m asleep. I walk around the room and out into the hallway. Typically, I am ranting, and what I’m saying centers on a perceived emergency—my kids in trouble, intruders in the house—or weirder, on surveillance devices that I’m convinced are planted around my bedroom, sinister forces watching me sleep.

Sometimes, my husband is still awake and succeeds in convincing me that I’m unconscious and that no, no one is watching us from the framed Kandinsky hanging over the dresser. Sometimes I wake on my own, standing, disoriented, still half inside the surveillance delusion. Then I get into bed and go back to sleep. Occasionally, I walk again shortly thereafter, or have another episode where I’m upright, on the edge of the bed, muttering. The emergency again, the cameras concealed in a painting—whatever it is, always nebulous but terrifying, always related to my children or to the exposure of my most vulnerable self.

In the morning I can only sort of remember. I apologize for waking my husband. We laugh it off. I feel tired all day long. Night falls and it happens again.

I wanted it to stop. The episodes are symptoms of a sleep disorder I’ve had since childhood—or more precisely they are the disorder. My mother and one of my sisters have it too. Ours was a household of somnambulists. Someone was always getting up and creeping around. I recall my sister taking off her clothes, stripping her bed, and carrying everything solemnly down to the laundry room. Once as an undergrad, I woke kneeling at the foot of my roommate’s bed, trying to tell her something urgent. At grad school in New Hampshire, I came to in the hallway stairwell, on my way outside into three feet of snow.

For most people, sleepwalking occurs in childhood and abates by adulthood. Between five and 15 percent of kids sleepwalk, compared to only one or 1.5 percent of adults. In the last half-decade, as my life has gotten fuller (two kids, a day job, a writing career) the walking has gone from occasional and manageable to acute and debilitating. 

Earlier this year, at a standard checkup, my doctor said she’d give me a referral for a sleep study. You spend a night in a facility being monitored and then they prescribe you pills. Since the episodes tend to center on surveillance, I admit I’m scared about what might happen. To seek out a scenario where I’m hooked up to machines, and a doctor is watching—is this not counterintuitive? I picture a hideous outburst, like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: me hurling a piece of machine, fleeing down a hallway, needing a shot to be subdued.

I know I’m headed for the study, but first I wanted to see if I could make it go away. I decided that sensory deprivation might be the answer. I already had a white noise machine, but I figured glimpsing the Kandinsky across the bedroom could not be helpful (it’s Several Circles, which looks like a bunch of interconnected eyeballs). Online, I purchased the Alaska Bear Natural Sleep Silk Mask. The mask is black and no-frills and costs $10. It is a perfect object in that there is nothing unnecessary about it. For some reason, the back of the box features an Oscar de la Renta quote: “Silk does for the body what diamonds do for the hand.”

I worried about what would happen when I wore it. I thought it might lead to further disorientation, that if I could not see, I’d fall down the stairs or punch through a window or otherwise hurt myself. I thought it might lead to a different kind of sleep madness, which scared me, because even if my current patterns are torture, at least they are familiar.

My father used to call the anxieties of adulthood “The Fear.” He told me about it when he was around 40 and I was nine. Now I am almost 40 with a nine-year-old and I know what he meant. The Fear is the crush of your responsibilities, the dread of having to execute them, compounded by the knowledge of your eventual death. If the worsened sleepwalking is an expression of this, I don’t think a mask can cure it.

In the sleep mask, has the walking improved? It’s become different. Some of the confusion now centers on being unable to see. Often, I cannot figure out why it is so dark. I have stopped worrying about the painting, which is a plus. But now I am engaged in a nightly tango with this object. Taking it off, putting it back on, puzzling over it. In the morning, I find it in surprising places. Across the room with my phone or neatly placed back in my beside drawer.

I have not solved the problem, so much as fed the disorder a new distraction. The issue is medical and likely not curable, and I find this bracing. The last time I slept really well was almost two years ago, after a red eye to Paris with my eighteen-month-old who stayed up the entire time. When we finally made it to our hotel, the sleep was dreamless and bludgeoning. I fantasize about that, mourn it like you do a lost love.

Still, I will continue to follow the guidance—don the mask, if futilely. The mask is soft and neither helps nor hurts. In the morning I will apologize. I am so sorry for being insane.

THE REST OF OBJET

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