Relationship Rules - Sleepy Style

There are a few "rules" that I "choose" to follow when I'm with my girlfriend as appose to when I'm not. Obviously, manners and courtesy are among them, but there are a few other things that I do that concern sleep, or the lack thereof.



Rule 1: Chris is forbidden from using his phone's alarm.
Okay, so, due to the fact that I am an incredibly heavy sleeper, I need very loud alarms, and a lot of them! My girlfriend on the other hand, would wake up if someone 3 doors down the hall sneezed in her sleep. There are a couple of problems with this setup, and even more so now that I'm converting myself to run on the Uberman sleep schedule. The first problem is noise levels. My alarms are like nuclear bombs detonating (and up until recently, I used to use the iPhone's "nuke" ringer, which I found hilarious), while hers are like crickets.  For her, her cricket chirps are perfectly fine to wake her up and for her to be conscious enough to function. I, however, do require a bombshell going off in my ere before even my subconscious awakens.

I'm going into a little side note here to mention that I've got mixed feelings about my deep sleeping patterns. Obviously, it makes getting up to alarms significantly more difficult to do, but something occurred to me just the other day when my girlfriend approached me after one of my naps and apologized. She had placed me in the social room at the end of the hall because she knew her roommate was going to be returning with her family to move her stuff out of her room, and didn't want me to be bothered (or for her roommate's family to be bothered by the sleeping man in bed). This was an amazing idea, she thought, until the little brothers of her roommate started running up and down the hall and repeatedly entered/exited through the side door located right next to the social room's entrance. This is a very heavy, metal side entrance that loves to slam and make a lot of noise. My girl could hear the slams from her room on the opposite side of the hall and cringed every time it happened, imagining me flinching in my sleep (or the impossibility thereof). However, I didn't hear a peep. In fact, when I awoke to my Pokemon theme song ringer, I felt amazing and very well rested. My use of a single ringtone to wake myself seems to be able to penetrate my deep sleep, while other sounds can't. This is amazing! It means that my naps should be more restful with less interruptions. However, it does also mean that no matter where I go, the people around me will have to hear the Pokemon theme song when it goes off to wake me up. It may not be the ideal song for all situations, but I'm sure conditioning and patience will give me another "waker" ringer.

Now, back on topic and as the rule says, I am completely banned from setting my phone's alarm. The only way that I am allowed to "set an alarm" is to have my girlfriend set her own phone's alarm for whatever time I want to get up at. Her phone will wake her up, she'll wake me up, and then a couple hours later, I'll return the favor so she doesn't have to reset her alarm. It's really not a bad method, and the only complaint I have is that it doesn't give me any "training" with getting up to my Pokemon ringer. On the plus side, I get gently woken up by her with a kiss and a "get out of my bed." Oh, such warm and fuzzy words! This, however, only applies when she is going to be sleeping. If she is awake, I regain the right to set my own alarm. If she may or may not be in the room when I wake up, I'll set my normal multiple alarms for 30 minutes in the future, which give me lots of redundancy to ensure I climb out of bed. If I know that she will most likely stay in the room, I'll instead set a 30 minute timer alarm that only goes off once. The idea is that it should, hopefully, wake me and cause me to get out of bed, but if that fails, it'll alert my girlfriend who will then hound me until I do get out of bed.


Rule 2: (Voluntary) When the lady goes to bed, you've got 15 minutes to finish up.
This rule is one I created for myself because of that courtesy thing listed above. Due to her light sleeping "problems," once she falls asleep, I try to let her get as much undisturbed sleep as possible. She isn't like my brother who can literally fall asleep mid-sentence (we were seriously talking, having a conversation, and I asked him a question and he said something like: "No, I don't think that its possible. I mean, just think about it. In order to do that you'd............" - Me: "Um... hello?" - Him: ".... Ugh... yeah, what?" -  Me: "Dude, you totally just fell asleep on me." - Him: "What? No I didn't.........." - Me: "Yeah you... seriously dude?"). Anyway, the point is, once she falls asleep, she really needs to stay that way for as long as possible, so I try to help her out. Normally, I'm the type of person who stays up until 3 AM and sleeps until noon, but my girl is kind of the opposite. She rarely stays up past midnight or so, and loves waking up around 8-9, or so it seems. I remember at some point in time she was staying with me, and I had a few responsibilities to my online community that I needed to perform before I went to bed. It took me a little under an hour, but within 5-10 minutes of starting this task, my girlfriend decided it was time for bed. So, I sent her to bed, and she didn't complain (much) about me still being on the computer. An hour later or so, my task was finished and my computer shut down, I climbed into bed and woke her up. She told me the next morning that she hadn't been sleeping too well lately due to stress and that she had just managed to fall asleep when I climbed in bed and woke her up. It then took her another hour or two before she could fall back asleep, especially since I don't like sleeping in a single position for very long and tend to move around a bit. After that, I felt bad and decided that I should be a bit better at not bothering her sleep when at all possible.

And now we fast forward to today, during my transition period. She still tends to go to bed around 12-12:30 or so, but I've been pushing my own bed time back to around 1:00-1:30. Also, I've been getting up at 5:15 for the past few nights, and because I can't set my own alarm, she has to wake up to wake me up. This means that no only do I bother her when I climb in bed at 1, but that I'll also bother her when I get out of bed at 5:15. For now, after I wake up, I gather my computer and head into the community kitchen and play games, write blogs or post on forums. I usually find something to keep me entertained until my 9 AM nap. I don't tend to play my normal League of Legend matches on my laptop due to how crappy the thing is. The game is a bit slow to run, and I'm the type of person that can tell the difference between a ping of 50 and a ping of 100, so if my laptop is dropping every other frame, everything is too choppy for me to be at my best. But that's fine, as I've found that even as relaxing as blogging and reading posts is, its not too bad and still manages to keep my brain engaged, which is extremely important to keep myself from falling asleep.

Now, lets fast forward again to the future. I'm fully on my Uberman sleep schedule, napping at 1, 5 and 9 AM, all of which could possibly conflict with my girlfriend's normally (lame) sleeping schedule. So, how am I going to handle this? Well, it'll be really difficult for a couple of reasons. First of all, I'll be bothering her twice in a 20-30 minute span of time, and she probably won't be able to fall asleep as quickly as I can, which means she's going to be awake the entire time, which just sucks for her. The second problem is related to rule 1 above; I can't set my alarm. So, not only will she be awake for the period of my nap, but she'll also have to be conscious enough to wake me up when my timer runs out. Twice. This is terrible!

So, what can be done? Well, there are a few things I will be doing, given the situation that presents itself. If we are at my apartment, I'll be napping on the couch instead of in my bed. While at her dorm, I may be able to nap in the social room, but that may cause problems when someone finds a random guy napping in the dorms of an all girls college, so we'll have to see how well that works out. During the day, this shouldn't be an issue because I am allowed to use my alarms, and my girlfriend shouldn't be sleeping, so I should be able to nap in a bed, couch, car, etc. Actually, I am curious as to how well I'd nap in a car, but that's an experiment for another time.


Rule 3: (Involuntary) Chris must always obey his girlfriend, even when unconscious.
Okay, so this one sounds bad, especially the "involuntary" and "unconscious" part, but scarily enough, its true. Since I am unconscious, the only way I knew about this is through stories that my girlfriend tells me. So, this could all be some crazy sham, but I honestly believe her. I want to muse on the topic for a little bit, explain a scenario that leads me to believe this, then I'll list out the commands that I am supposedly programmed to follow.

First of all, wow! This idea/rule completely amazes and baffles me, especially given my deep sleep and difficulties waking up. It would seem that when I sleep, my conscious mind is locked away in a box and hidden/protected from my surrounding environment. I am the type of person that would probably sleep through a building fire unless the fire alarm went off or my bed collapsed. But, I honestly wouldn't be that surprised if I woke up outside the building, because my subconscious knew I was in trouble and decided to control my body and walk me out the door. Yeah, none of that would surprise me based on the stories my girlfriend tells. It would be nice to know exactly what is going on in my brain. Its just so incredibly cool how the subconscious works and especially in my case, where my conscious brain is completely separated from absolutely everything, and yet I can still function.

I've got first hand experience with this weird phenomenon (or is it normal?) through phone chats with my girlfriend. It has been well established that I'm not always conscious when people talk to me on the phone, especially in the morning. There are a couple of types of phone "conversations" that take place when I'm not completely conscious.
1) I adopt my girlfriend's morning phone calls as my personal alarm clock. Its nice to be able to chat and figure out what each others plans are for that day, and to discuss any long term plans we've got (vacations, visits, etc). So, she calls me up one morning and our chats proceed. I, however, am not aware that I'm even on the phone. I am literally still asleep at this point. After about 5 minutes into the phone conversation, I say something like: "Yeah, then I've got to head up to the sixth floor and... wait a minute... I live on the fourth... um... hello? um... when did you call?" So, whatever it was that my subconscious got wrong, my conscious brain was there, monitoring, and immediately triggered to pull me out of my sleep. It was pretty weird, but not that unusual for me.
2) I had stopped using my girlfriend's calls as a regular alarm, because she was busy with school, and didn't always call (the first time this happened was quite a pain, as she didn't realize I was relying on her for my morning alarm). So, my alarm went off, I got dressed, went to breakfast on campus and then headed to class. About halfway through my day, during one of my class breaks, I call my girl up and the conversation starts like this:
"Hey babe, hows it goin? I didn't hear from you this morning, anything exciting going on?"
"Hey there. What do you mean? I called this morning."
"Um... you did?"
"Yeah, we were on the phone for about half an hour or so."
"Oh..."
"Ah, one of those mornings... Well..." *gives 30 second recap of our 30 minute phone call*
So, apparently, I can have full fledged phone calls even when not conscious. Now, I know the first complaint against this will be: "you were just tired, and was probably babbling nonsense", but from what I've had explained to me from multiple people, they had NO IDEA I was still asleep. They claimed that I was completely rational, understandable and completely responsive to the point that I accurately confirmed details given to me, such as where to meet for breakfast or phone numbers. So, its not that I've had random, nonsensical babbling sessions with my friends and family, but real conversations where 1 person was completely unconscious through the entire conversation. I'd tell you first hand about them, but, being unconscious, I don't remember much (anything) about them.

So, knowing that, are you still surprised by my subconscious "boyfriend bot" following commands? Yeah, me neither. Currently, these are the command I've been known to follow:
1) Scoot over
2) Stop snoring
3) Move your arm
4) Roll over
5) Kiss me

Okay, so the last one isn't a command, but I will kiss her back if she kisses me. Its weird and scary at the same time. Though, I do wonder what else she's gotten me to do while unconscious that she hasn't told me about.


So yeah, I'm looking forward to what additional "rules" will be created or changed when I get on this schedule. The alarm thing might be problematic because I'll need to wake up 20-30 minutes within laying down, which means I either set my alarm, or I'd have to have my girlfriend stay up for that length of time while I got to sleep, which is kinda lame. Perhaps by then, I'll have trained myself to wake up to a quieter alarm, we'll have to see how well that goes. The whole going to bed thing when she does is completely out the window, even at this stage in the transition. As far as the commands are concerned, I don't think I'll be following those anymore. I would hope that she wouldn't be telling me to move around too much while I tried to sleep because even if she only bothered me for 2 minutes, that would translate to something like 20 minutes of constant bothering for a normal person who slept only at night. But maybe I'll have her test me to see if I respond. My guess is that I'll be so deep in sleep and completely out of it that I'll stop responding.