Insensible

3 Mar 2010

This is what I am at the moment. I didn’t sleep very well last night, but at least I knew I wasn’t sleeping very well. Being awake will do that to you. But now I have discovered a new and terrifying experience – knowing that I haven’t slept well even if I feel fine.

Technology is to blame of course – or at least my insistence on using it. You may have heard of an iPod/iPhone app called “Sleep Cycle”. It’s quite remarkable. It’s an intelligent alarm clock, and the basic principle is that – using the touch & iPhone’s motion detecting capabilities (you know, the one’s that turn the screen on its side when you’re trying to surf the internet in bed and which skip your songs if you forget to turn of “Shake to shuffle” before you go running) – the app will monitor your sleep by attaching certain physical movements to a phase of sleep (or almost sleep) from a) awake through b) dreaming and down to c) deep sleep (the holy grail).

When you get within a certain distance of your chosen wake up time, the app will respond to the sensors suggesting that you are in a light sleep phase, and gently waken you with a mellow tune. The idea is that if you wake from light sleep, you feel more refreshed than if you are unluckily pulled from the middle of deep sleep by your non-flexible old fashioned alarm clock.

It seems to work. Not only that but if often buys you an extra 20 minutes or even half an hour, since it’s obviously designed to play safe and nudge you awake *before* your alarm time and not afterwards.

But there is a downside. It has the nifty ability to turn the results of its monitoring into a wee graph. So each morning, after you are synthed awake by Jean Michael Jarre’s mellow nephew, it shows you exactly how well you slept. And bugger me if that isn’t one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen.

The first night was full of the delightful dips of deep sleep. The fact that I knew that made me feel as restful as if I spent a week on a desert island being fed grapes by a young Angela Rippon (who would keep me up to date with the news at the same time).

Well. Hurrah.

The next night, I didn’t sleep so well. My graph representing a rather sad curve of “awake” with two narrow spikes of deep sleep, evenly spaced. It looked a bit like a vampire’s smile.

Not so good. But I knew I hadn’t slept well. It was a couple of weeks later that depressed me.

I awoke, a little tired but happy enough. I turned off Synth Man and lazily flipped to the statistics chart.

The chart looked like The Remarkables in New Zealand. And endless jaggedy progression of really not being properly asleep, marching its way across my night.

As soon as I saw it, I felt as exhausted as if I had climbed that range myself. Was I tired because I didn’t sleep well? Or was I tired because I knew – thanks to external factors – that I hadn’t slept well.

I don’t know. But I’d like someone to sneak into my room and re-programme the phone so that it tells me that I’ve had 8 hours of deep sleep, even if I know that I’ve gone to bed at 2am and had to get up at 5 to get a train to Bratislava. It would be nice.