Because I’m five again

Last night, I actually fell out of bed.

I had drifted into a very deep sleep, but my body was pushing my mind back up to semi-consciousness. Sleep Christine felt boiling hot under the covers. So my sleep-premise was that I needed to get some of my body out from under the covers to vent, and I needed to physically move my body off the hot-spot on the mattress that my own overheated body had created. However, my movement became complicated.

A few years ago, when my back pain that turned out to be a mild form of arthritis started ramping up, I bought one of those space age foam mattress pads that sits on top of your regular earth-based mattress. Somehow, this mattress pad always migrates to my side of the bed, leaving my husband on the original mattress, and draping my side of the bed with an over-hanging curl of space age foam shelf.

I suspect that this mattress pad migration is the result of my getting out of bed far more frequently than my husband. He gets into bed and stays there. I get into bed, and I get up to go to the bathroom, I get up because I forgot to fill the tank on my humidifier, I get up because I need a glass of water, I get up to see if my husband is still watching TV, I get up to go to the bathroom again, and so on. I presume that each time I roll out of my side of the bed, I’m taking a tiny slice of the mattress pad over the edge with me, which accumulates gradually into my extra twelve inches of foam hanging over the bed. I don’t mind it very much, and my husband has said he prefers the bed without the mattress pad, so every couple of months we take apart the sleep system completely and start over with the pad back in place, but we mostly leave it the way it is.

Last night, as I half-asleep wiggled out from under some of the blankets, I also half-asleep decided I needed to be lying on my stomach at the very edge of the bed for optimal cool air exposure. In my somnambulant state, however, I miscalculated the actual edge of the bed because of the bed-shelf illusion created by the draped foam pad. As I rolled into stomach plus edge position, I felt my body slowly give way to gravity, fading to my left, and I fell into a pile of books, magazines, a suitcase, some laundry, and lots of extension cords. I hit hard with my left knee and hip on the floor, and my back must have bumped the dresser. The rest of me stopped on the poky corners and edges of all that stuff.

I instantly knew what happened, but I was still only partially awake. I climbed out of a heap on the floor, staggering to my feet like a fake drunk in a movie, and lurched out into the living room. “I just fell out of bed,” I said to my husband.

“Oh, is that what that sound was?”

“Yeah. It hurt like a bitch too.”