Today, October 6th, 2023, is the fifteenth anniversary of my liver transplant. I started putting pieces on a blog so that my grandson, who was aged one and whom I had only met once, could read something about me in case things went wrong.
I haven’t notified anyone of posts for 18 months but I am posting this to mark the transplant anniversary and also so my four grandchildren may know aspects of their grandmother’s character that they would never have suspected.
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I am a very light sleeper. I always have been. Every night, I find it difficult to go to sleep and then I usually wake up about every 90 minutes until I get up in the morning.
I have never set an alarm clock to wake me, and I have never been late for anything because I overslept. Even when we had a taxi booked for 3:15 in the morning because we had to be at Quebec airport at 4:00, I didn’t need an alarm.
Caroline, on the other hand, is, on most nights, a very deep sleeper. In the mornings, from Monday until Friday, she has to set her clock to wake her and at the weekends, she always lies in.
One of the reasons that my sleep is so interrupted is that even although she sleeps deeply, Caroline is restless and often, extremely noisy. She also hallucinates.
I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been woken by a heavy slap on the back because she has tried to remove the ants or spiders she has seen crawling over me. The worst time was when she punched me on the head to remove the badger that she could see sitting on it.
Occasionally, whatever it is that she “sees” is so alarming and frightening that she lets out a blood curdling scream. If I ask her then, at the time, what it is she saw, she will tell me but if I mention it in the morning, she has no recollection of it whatsoever.
Often, instead of a scream, Caroline reacts to a nightmare by just shouting out a short but loud stream of obscenities. I worry that our neighbour whose bedroom is adjacent to ours, can hear them and must wonder what on earth is going on.
Sometimes, I hear one side of a conversation with no shouting or swearing but the kind of thing you might hear if you were in the same room as someone on the phone. It’s not loud but it always wakes me.
Last night, I heard Caroline ask in a conversational tone, “Have you been to Hill Bears Hotel?”
It was such an arbitrary and random question to be asking at 3.10 in the morning, that I got my phone and made a note of it. Then, I slept until 5.55 when for some reason or other, she kicked my leg.
“Have you been to Hill Bears Hotel?” is such a strange thing to say in your sleep, that in the morning, I showed Caroline what I had on my phone and asked if it meant anything to her.
Almost immediately, she said that it did. Even though she had no memory of the dream that led to her saying it, what she actually must have said was, “Have you been to Hilbert’s Hotel?”
Hilbert’s Hotel is a thought experiment that shows a property of infinity. Hilbert imagined a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all of which are occupied by guests, but even though the hotel is full, rooms may always be found for new arrivals.
If a normal hotel is full, newcomers cannot be accommodated but at Hilbert’s, the guest currently in room 1 moves to room 2, the guest currently in room 2 to room 3, and so on, meaning that room 1 is empty for the recent arrival. If a coachload arrives, everyone moves 54 rooms to create the necessary vacancies.
As you can imagine, life in our bedroom is never dull.
