I’ve been sick for a couple of days now, and so the "sleep scores" presented by my watch are abysmal. My first night, I was feverish. I dreamt that I had to relearn the alphabet, but I had to do it through my dreams, one letter per dream at a time. Peppered in with this delusional thinking were various facts about the Roman Empire, from an audiobook I was listening to help me fall asleep. As I pondered over my abysmal sleep scores (23/100!), I wondered about how the Garmin watch can calculate how well you sleep. So I looked it up.

Garmin uses a third party called First Beat Analytics, which seems to be some kind of heartbeat analytics software. Then it uses that data to rate your sleep on a scale of 0 to 100. Generally, the data that’s mostly used is heart data, but Garmin also has data related to how much exercise you got, and that obviously plays a part in how well you sleep and how much sleep you need to recover.

But I didn’t write this post to dive into how Garmin watches work. I was only partially interested in that.

What I have been thinking about is how I am at the mere beginning of a life with less sleep due to having children. Of course, I was warned. ^[1]. I might even be one of those lucky people that can function with a bit less sleep than others. Moreover, I’m a morning person. So you might say that the odds are stacked in my favour at this time. That being said, I’ve already encountered several delirious, sleep-deprived middle-of-the-night moments that I will treasure in my weird way.

Aside from the possible perils of adjudicating one’s own sleep, I’ve been adjudicating the definition of sleep in itself. And I’ve been wondering about the term rest. Sleep with children in your life becomes a zone beyond just rest. It’s a moment of being able to drop all responsibilities. Maybe that’s what rest is by definition, or that’s what it’s partially being redefined to now. It’s a shame I can’t be conscious during it. ^[2].

Another fun fact, I love falling asleep to nonfiction stuff about space. I go through waves of being fascinated by space and the cosmos. For the first two months of our kids’ lives, I was listening to the book "The Universe in Your Hand" over and over. I listened to the whole book and then backtracked to different parts trying to find the interesting parts. It’s a particularly good book because it uses the second-person narrative, placing you in the proverbial driver’s seat as you explore different facets of space, quantum physics, and other theoretical things.

That plug aside, if anybody knows any other space or scientific non-fiction audiobooks they’d recommend, send them my way. I think what I’m looking for are more comprehensive versions of what I got to study in elementary school. You know when you would spend a unit on space and just learn about planets and stuff like that? Basically, I want the version of that that’s a bit more advanced, almost like a textbook being read to me that I fall asleep to every night.

Another thing that lulls me to sleep is planning the next move on a project. It’s part exciting, part menial, but it seems to drop me like a stone into a still pond: once the ripples fade — I’m gone. Or occasionally, I’ll think about putting together a perfectly packed stationary kit for going out to draw or paint: just the right number of different-sized pens, a few select colours for a limited palette, and the right paper.

I’ve done things like this since I was a kid—try to set myself up to have vibrant, adventurous dreams—I don’t think about the painting I would make, but the steps I would take to go paint it. I’ve often thought I could set myself up to dream something incredible.

Does it work? Maybe. Most days I don’t remember my dreams. But perhaps I still have them, then in that illusory, invisible rest—then, I wake up restored.

1. When I mentioned our expecting to someone, they said: "prepare not to sleep for 10 years". Here’s MY TIP: don’t say things like that to people, even if you think you’re being funny. They know they’re not going to sleep. You don’t need to make it even more dramatic or scary than it already seems. ↩

2. I think when I was 18, I devoured everything I could about lucid dreaming. Never worked. ↩