The Wrong Side

Little Nemo found all the sides of the bed to fall out of.

 

Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

Which side is the wrong side of the bed, again?

Honestly, there are plenty of days when all the sides of the bed appear to be the wrong side and it would have been much safer to stay within all sides of the bed. The bed is a safe, warm space. At some point it becomes a warm, safe and smelly place so exiting from one of the sides is the only appropriate action. Then there are other days when my bed has no wrong sides. All the sides are the right sides. From a geometric point of view, I'm not sure this makes sense. If this matter of bed egress is simply a matter of having a bad day, then I'm guessing over the last year, a whole lot of people had beds with wrong sides.

You can definitely get in on the wrong side of the bed. For a long time I've known my natural go-to-bedtime is so late, it might be considered early. Likewise my natural get-out-of-bedtime is so late that, well, it can only be considered late. To make matters worse, I would find myself lying awake, waiting for sleep to come. It took sleeplessness to realize that all that exercise I used to do made sleep quite easy. I'm not saying it made me a morning person but at the very least it made me a socially acceptable mid-morning person. Than came all the reasons I stopped exercising and then came the pandemic.

The ability to stay in bed until the last second before having to get up to join a video call (minus the video) has transformed my sleep from adequate to completely shifted. It's like I'm living in an adjacent time zone. My schedule is literally off by UTC -7. I can get away with this because most people I work with are UTC -8. How to correct this? Enter edible cannabis products.

It took a fair amount of experimentation - not a Snoop Dogg or Seth Rogen level of experimentation - to figure out what mix worked for me. To be honest I'm quite happy with the results. I found a combination that I don't really feel strongly, but helps me sleep and awaken refreshed. There have been times when I took something too soon after eating, only to have no effect. I've also made the mistake of taking something too strong too late and have the affects felt hours after I got up (making for a less than productive day). I also worried, not that I would become addicted to something but that I was training my mind and body that this is how you sleep, by taking something. Yet something different seems to have happened.

Lately I ran out of my supply and didn't have a chance to replenish it but I discovered a happy accident. It seems I have trained myself to sleep by some kind of Pavlovian response. I'm still going to bed late (something in China referred to as revenge bedtime procrastination), but now when I see the bed I feel a slight light-headedness and sleepiness. I think it's just that my body assumes, "there's the bed, that gummie must be kicking in".

Whatever the case, I'm getting into bed on the right side which means when I wake up, it's so much easier to avoid the wrong side.