Sleep Searching

I read a lot of health articles in magazines and on the internet. 9 times out of 10 I completely ignore what they say. It all sounds great at first: "10 Ways to be a Better Person Today!" And then you get to number 2 and you realize that all 10 of their steps are going to actually require some effort. And there's no way that's happening.

One of their tips that I always ignore is to not sleep with your smartphone. Like the rest of the connected world, I use my phone as my alarm clock. My phone is the last thing I see before I go to bed, and the first thing I see when I wake up. And lately, it's even been something I see during sleep. And that's kind of freaking me out.

I'm a very restless sleeper...I often will exaggerate and say that I don't sleep at all. Like that Chuck Norris joke, "Chuck Norris doesn't sleep, he waits." But anyways, as of late, when I inevitably wake up in the middle of the night, I have found myself immediately turning over and opening up my phone. Oftentimes this will be before I'm even fully awake, so that when I come to I'm already halfway through a game of Angry Birds.

Ok so I have never actually played Angry Birds in my sleep, but here's a short list of other things I have caught myself doing:

-Checking my horoscope
-Reading an article from Women's Health Magazine on Twitter (and ignoring all their tips, of course)
-IMDB'ing Daniel Day Lewis
-Google searching lyrics for "Ho Hey" by the Lumineers

Daniel Day Lewis? Seriously? I woke up at 3am and I immediately thought to myself: I MUST KNOW WHAT MOVIES DANIEL DAY LEWIS IS IN!

(Turns out I knew him from watching The Crucible my junior year of high school.)

Another strange thing to point out here is that when I use my phone in this half-sleeping state, there are never any mistakes. I'm looking up the correct horoscope, I don't accidentally tweet things, there are no typos in my searches...I feel like that barely happens when I'm actually fully awake.

Maybe someday I'll take the magazines advice and power down my phone when I go to sleep...but for now I figure, I'm mostly using it for educational purposes anyways...learning while sleeping actually seems like a pretty good deal!


"I have known her sir!!"
-John Proctor (Daniel Day Lewis), The Crucible