I’m not proud of this.
Several times a night, I wake up and can’t figure out what to do with my arms. This is in spite of the fact that they have been part of my basic equipment for as long as I can remember. I have gone to sleep something like 23,000 times and it’s still an issue. Anyone would think I could have worked it out by now, but I haven’t.
I will wake up on my side with one arm crunched under me and my fist under my pillow, and the other fist crunched up under my chin. I am a giant mantis. One or both hands might feel achy or strained. I stretch out the topmost arm to get the kinks out and unfurl it along the mattress, but then it’s insufficient as a buttress and I start to slump.
So I roll over onto my stomach, my preferred sleeping position, and elaborately re-punch my pillow so as to support my forehead while excavating a breathing pocket. Arms meet over my head, under the pillow. This is a delicate adjustment and I can spend several minutes getting it right. I am trying to avoid the situation where I dream about being underwater too long and finally jolt awake gasping because my face is solidly pressed into the mattress. So far, I am old enough to jolt awake and move, and not so old that I can’t, but that time’s coming.
My mother, I believe, put me face down to sleep when I was an infant. People get all worked up about that sort of thing now, but this was during the post-war baby boom and there wasn’t such a big fuss about keeping any one baby alive. Evidently I was resourceful enough or round enough to survive and I have been a stomach-sleeper since forever, which was in 1953.
But it’s a pity, because the only way to sleep without your arms getting in the way is to sleep on your back, which I can’t seem to do.
Arms are important, of course, but mainly it’s the wiggly bits at the ends that seal the deal on most transactions, drawing, or jar-opening, or the like, and the arms just get you a bit of reach (no offense to Thalidomide-Americans). The rest of the time they dangle from your shoulders and swing weirdly. Imagine how befuddled your standard gazelle would be, bounding across the plain, and watching our front legs flopping around like that.
Your arms aren’t really supposed to be doing anything when you’re asleep, and if they are, nobody wants to hear about it. But for most of us there are not a lot of options for how they’re hooked up to the anatomy. Your shoulders aren’t necessarily where you want them while you’re sleeping but they’re not deflatable.
Nothing like this is a problem for my cat Tater, who occasionally sleeps right next to me. For a fifteen-pound mammal, she can really pin down a blanket. I’ve never seen her look at all uncomfortable. I don’t know exactly what is inside her fuzzy packaging, but I do know it is well past al dente.
For me, though, it gets fussy. I can get one arm all unrolled and spread out and I move it an inch up or an inch down until the humors feel unrestricted again, but by that time I need to find the cool spot. If nothing gets worked out in a hurry there’s a danger I will wake up enough to imagine solutions, such as arms that retract like hoses when you’re not using them, or a pit drilled into the mattress to accommodate a face rest with a drool bucket underneath, or a suspended shoulder-hammock made of butterfly wings, and if I think about it long enough to realize these solutions don’t really make sense, then I’m really really awake, and vulnerable to remembering who’s President.
Wish Mom had put me on my back.
I woke up one midnight with only one arm. The other was a dead weight with a cold rubber glove attached at the far end. The arm had somehow escaped the bed and parked the hand on the cold floor until it lost consciousness. It took forever to bring back any signs of life.
OMG! That freaks me out when it happens to me. My arm is just hanging there and it literally cannot move a muscle on its own. I just grab it with my other arm and swing it around until the circulation comes back. Of course, by then I am so awake and weirded out that I can't get back to sleep.
I have a worse story! My arm once fell asleep like that, dead as can be, and I woke up when it landed solidly on my chest. I grabbed the strange arm with my other hand, sprang up into a sitting position, and pulled my arm off of me. Then a moment of confusion while my brain sorted it all out and my heart thundered at a non-existent threat. Imagine trying to get to sleep after that! To the plus, Trump was not president at that time.
I didn't write about it, but I will admit it's really weird to have to pick up your own arm and shake it awake. What if you wake up and your chest is dead? Can that happen?
After my father's stroke, that's what his left arm was like. All the time. Sometimes he would pick it up in his other hand and have to think for a few seconds to realize whose arm it was. (He had a bit of fuzzy thinking toward the end.)
I'm sorry for your dad, but now I can't stop thinking about Tim Conway as the dentist picking up his Novocained arm and swatting a fly with it.
That's the main reason I can't sleep on my stomach any more. I used to love to sleep on my stomach with my hands up under the pillow. But each time, my right arm would fall asleep, dead. I'd wake up as if someone broke in and sewed someone else's arm to my shoulder. It was like a piece of dead meat hanging there.
Good thing it was only one arm and not both, or I'd have never been able to get out of bed.
Gaaah. Yeah. Somehow, it is never reassuring during a bout of insomnia to think that at least part of you is asleep.
Those big 'ol pillows that you can snuggle up to and throw one arm & one leg over can help. It's still basically sleeping on your stomach but it alters the weight distribution.
Um…. Isn't that what Dave is for?
Well, your mileage my vary. Some bed partners have inexplicable objections to being punched into different shapes throughout the night.
I always wondered what those pillows were for. I thought they were just for people who thought their beds were too big.
Yeah, I just thought they were filler.
There's never been a better description of a cat's inner support system than 'well past al dente."
Dogs, I think, would be a cloth sack half full of Lincoln logs. How they can be so floppy-soft and so bone-poky at the same time beggars belief.
We've had a fifteen-pound dog and two fifteen-pound cats and the difference in the Lap Experience is profound. You nailed it, sister.
Please, dear, what becomes of your bosomy parts when you sleep on your tummy? I know that’s quite personal, but you started it, and I remember boobie posts from the archives, so…I slept on my stomach through the dorm years, but it gradually got more uncomfortable bosomwise, and now I can’t even. I’d like to, but I seem to have forgotten the trick. Whatever do you DO with them?
I'd like the answer to this question, too, please!!
Not sure I want to hear something about flanging them off to the sides or something. Maybe we should just let that question pass.
Oh, there's the verb "flang" again. It's my favorite made up word.
I haven't answered yet because I have NO IDEA why it doesn't bother me. Except that everything's sort of soft and puddly and tenderness is a thing of the past. Sometimes I do have to rearrange things so I don't get a boobie crease.
Flang is totally a word! It's the past tense of fling! Innit? And shame on you, Jono, you know you want to hear about that.
You could do more research. Dave could help.
I know what you're describing, although to a lesser extent. But it always seems that by the time I wake up, my arms are all comfy and I can't even think back to this morning what position they were in. Just comfy. Not trying to rub it in or anything, but COMFY 🙂 A few years back, when I started finding it hurt badly all over to sleep on a regular mattress, I put first one and finally two mattress toppers (the memory foam) on top of the mattress and it's just right now. Maybe you need something similar for your arms and other sticky-out parts to sink into.
I have one ser-i-ous pillowtop mattress. It's a cloud. Memory foam is great. I heard that it retains heat, though, and that would be a deal-breaker.
I'd love to sleep on a cloud 🙂
This is the absolute best blog post and series of comments ever.
And the waking up enough to remember who's president. GAH.
That has cost me minutes to hours of sleeplessness every night since November 2016. I am not even kidding.
Having spent the last 4 weeks in hospital and physical rehab facility with an injury that requires me to sleep flat on back at night, I know your pain. I am by nature a side sleeper, fetal type.
You know a whole bunch more pain than I do. When do you get out of there?
Murr, you are the only person I've ever known to mention this particular affliction that apparently comes with getting (ahem) older. I thought it was just me who every damn night wishes I could remove my arms at the shoulder and store them on the shelf until morning! Only thing worse is trying to get a full night's sleep with a 4 year old grandchild in the bed. You'd think in a queen-sized bed, there would be room for one small child and an average sized adult, but you'd be wrong, as he turns into a heat-seeking missile during the night and no matter what I do, I end up clinging to the mattress edge with about 12" of space for my body…and those dang arms.
New excuse for the employed: "I couldn't reach my alarm clock to set it after I stored my arms on the shelf."
I bet your mum put you on your stomach because that was the only way you would sleep, like my youngest who was a tummy sleeper from day one. Everyone else was horrified and wanted to turn him over and I spent a lot of time telling them to leave a sleeping baby alone. No one wants a screamer in the house. I don't have any problems with my arms, but my hands curl in at the wrists so now I'm sleeping with splints to keep the pressure off the carpal tunnels because that pain is excrutiating and would wake me up nightly. Apart from that I can sleep on my back or on either side, but can't sleep on my stomach. None of this is any help to you of course. Have you tried hanging from the ceiling like a bat?
Wow, did you hear about the 70-year-old hunter around here who spent two days upside-down thirty feet up a tree? He is NOT doing well.
Two days is a lot longer than a night, but I agree my suggestion is not a good one.
Cats do yoga, enabling them to be mini-furry Gumbys.
Yoga hell. They're pudding in pajamas.
Just when I sorted out the arm issue, the universe saw fit to necessitate a CPAP machine. So while I can array my limbs in a semi pleasing manner my face is now half wringed with a noodly silicone appendage which clicks into six feet of pressurized air delivery at the top of my head. Occasionally my largest cat will arrange himself on top of my pillows and place a paw over the vented air at the top of my mask, creating a loud hiss and a challenge to deep nose breathing. This amuses him.
Oh I live in fear of the CPAP just because I'll have to be on my back forever, which means I will die of noteversleeping.
I'm not a face-down sleeper but if I had that drilled pit with a drool bucket, I would love to try it again! It's the having to twist my neck to the side while sleeping downwise that cricked my neck too much.
Yeah. That's my problem too. Sometimes when I wake up to switch sides of my face I have to lift my head carefully and wait a few beats to get it to loosen up.
Can you sleep propped in a sitting position?