The Unhinged Madness Within Sam’s Brain

Hi. I haven’t written on this blog in more than a year. Here’s a fun story about sleep apnea.

Growing up, my parents always told me that I snored badly, even as a toddler. It was so bad that friends didn’t want to sleep over, and their parents were concerned with my health when I stayed with them; I would often stop breathing for upwards of a minute at a time. At age 10 or so, I had my tonsils removed, but that didn’t do much to help. Sleep apnea is a stubborn beast in that way. For me, it was equal parts embarrassing and frustrating. After all, how am I supposed to stop something that I have virtually no control over?

For a long time things continued this way, but it got really bad in recent years. When I stopped breathing in my sleep, I would often find myself jerked awake, the sudden opening of my esophagus functioning as a vacuum for stomach acid. Take it from me: choking on bile at 2:00 AM is not particularly enjoyable.

“The Apnea,” as we came to call it, also affected my wife–my poor, patient, wholesome wife. My endless shifting and tossing and snoring and hacking and choking was understandably disruptive to her own sleep, and time after time she insisted on finally addressing the issue.

Being embarrassed and frustrated, I fought her insistence. Turns out I was an idiot.

You see, beyond simply inconveniencing yourself and your significant other, The Apnea also comes with a host of medical risks. Not breathing means you’re not getting oxygen to your brain. Not getting enough oxygen over a long period of time (i.e. years, as in my case) kills brain cells, resulting in a number of scary side-effects, including diminished brain function and, in mega rare cases, something terrifyingly known as *ahem* Brain Death.

Additionally, those that suffer from The Apnea are exponentially more likely to suffer heart attacks, and a prolonged lack of oxygen can result in an enlarged heart, AKA cardiomyopathy (thanks, Web MD), which is itself a catalyst for some even more frightening medical bombshells that I’m too mentally exhausted to outline here.

One of the most prominent side effects of The Apnea is extreme exhaustion during the day, which is something I experienced nearly every day for over a year. After all, it’s hard to stay awake when you spend all night choking on your own gastric juice. Things got particularly scary when I started to doze while driving.

And so, as things got worse, my wife’s persistent requests that I see a somnologist became increasingly urgent. After some battles with denial, I finally caved.

About a year ago, after numerous visits to the sleep doctor, I was given a continuous positive airway pressure machine. At a basic level, CPAP machines pump air directly into your mouth while you sleep, which keeps the esophagus inflated and keeps the air flowing without obstruction.

The difference was, quite literally, night and day.

For the first time in years, I was sleeping entirely through the night. No longer was I awakened by choking fits, or falling asleep during the day, or compensating for the mental dulling that I had come to live with. Put simply, my wife forcing me to the sleep doctor is probably the best thing that has ever happened to my physical and mental health.

HOWEVER, there is one side effect of using a CPAP machine that I was not anticipating, and it’s this: the fucking dreams.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m sleeping consistently through the night, or because my brain is getting more oxygen than before, or some combination therein, but I have been experiencing the most off-the-wall, batshit crazy dreams of my life while using the CPAP machine. I know they say that you dream every night whether you remember it or not, but it feels like my mind is attempting to catch up on years of not dreaming, like a backed-up pipe of dream juice has suddenly been unclogged and the disgusting, viscous liquid is drowning my brain in a reservoir of hallucinogens. Every night it’s something new and bonkers, some kind of fantastical adventure, or terrifying encounter, or uplifting and heartwarming scene.

It’s gotten to the point where every time I don my mask before going to sleep, I joke with my wife that I’m strapping in for another night of the Unhinged Madness Within Sam’s Brain.

So, in an effort to cope with and process this newfound brain activity, I want to start cataloging my dreams. As a prospective author, these are prime material for short stories or, if expanded on properly, a novella or something even more ambitious. But the fleeting nature of dreams makes them ephemeral, and I want to hold on to them as much as I can.

This blog is where that cataloging will happen. Starting with my next indecipherable dream, I will, as quick as possible, head to the computer and start getting them out of my mind and into a blank document. My hope is that, with some cleaning up and elaborating, I can turn these dreams into short stories, making this a sort of experiment in developing my writing and storytelling skills.

Living with The Apnea is not a choice, so I might as well embrace the gifts it has given me, even if they are hellish dreams imparted by a mischievous brain demon that haunts me on a nightly basis, right?

Chat soon.