"The Screening Period" - Infinite Rest

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For something that seems so obscure, so unlikely, so remote it was remarkably easy to find the closest sleep studies to me. A quick google of “sleep study portland maine” didn’t turn up anything promising, so I tried “sleep study boston” and the first hit was to the Research Study Subject Recruitment page for the Harvard Division of Sleep Medicine. For some reason the success of a simple Google search is still able to instill some sense of pride, of self-sufficient (search-sufficient?) DIY know-how. There was a list of about 20 active studies, each with its own tagline and then a short summary of what the study would entail. The taglines offered some paltry information about the studies they were representing, but I think their main function was not to inform, but to lure in potential subjects. One study’s tagline was “Need some light in your life?” Only in the context of sleep studies can such a seemingly innocuous question feel so sinister. And of course there was no indication in that study’s summary that light would play a role in the study, leaving one no choice but to conclude that they would be locked in a room with the lights on for God knows how long.

Infinite Rest

Blogger's note: As most of you probably know, I participated in a sleep study at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston from November 12th to 25th, 2010. Over the next few months I'll periodically be posting the journal entries I wrote while in the hospital. Except for minor spelling and grammatical revisions, I've refrained from editing the journal entries and will be posting them exactly as they were originally, sloppily penned. However, I might end up omitting some of the boring stuff, for your sake and mine. I might even end up scrapping the entries altogether and just start making stuff up. But for now, integrity. And a few posts, such as the following prologue, have been written ex-hospital, to serve as contextual bookends. Hope you enjoy, or at least that you don't fall asleep.


Prologue

Sometime in the late summer or early fall of 2010 I found myself en route to Rumney, New Hampshire for a week, or maybe it was an extended weekend, of rock climbing. I was making the two and a half hour drive from Maine with Tucker, a friend who'd graduated from college a couple years before me and had been drifting between temporary jobs ever since. He wasn't the type to settle into an office job right after school, and as far as I know, he's still floating around somewhere, I think up in the Pacific Northwest now. A couple years earlier I'd driven cross-country with Tucker and a couple other friends. For us it had been an excuse to camp and climb across America and even earn a little college credit for it; for Tucker, it was a rather impromptu relocation, as he ended up staying in Crested Butte, Colorado to try his hand as a ski bum while the rest of us continued the road trip for another week or so before returning home to finish school.