The craziest thing happened last night: I slept. One minute I was yawning and working on an unfinished recap of my (uneventful) day, and the next I was so tired that I barely made it into bed before falling asleep.* It was a rare treat to pass out so quickly because it’s nearly impossible to get comfortable — particularly while reclining — during this stage of the Botox cycle, with the next round of injections a week or two away.
Those first few hours of sleep were typically fragmented and were followed by a bizarre dream involving former SNL cast members Nora Dunn and Victoria Jackson.** Are these vivid dreams possibly a byproduct of Parkinson’s? I used to chalk it up to taking Plaquenil, one of my arthritis medications, too close to bedtime, but have since noticed it also happens when it’s taken earlier in the day.
My first spectacularly vivid dream can be traced back to 2015, the year I started Plaquenil. It was long and cinematic and full of graphic violence that felt agonizingly lifelike, which was strikingly different than my usual dreams, which were mundane when they weren’t instantly forgotten. Only a couple years earlier, I’d started murmuring and laughing in my sleep and my legs took on a life of their own, which I only knew about due to my ex’s complaints.
That was also when I started waking up startled by noises she hadn’t heard, or troubled by phantom smells of smoke or natural gas. Now we know those were some of my earliest signs of Parkinson’s — maybe the dreams were, too, and the Plaquenil was a red herring. Whatever the case, none of it sprang to mind when the MDS first interrogated me about sleep and I was too focused on my lack of it to say “Weird dreams? Occasionally. I used to not remember them at all, or if I did they were about the dairy section of the grocery store being rearranged. Until the beheadings began.”^
Fortunately, things don’t get grisly too often. But I’ve woken up twice now pretty confident I was acting out parts of dreams too embarrassing to voluntarily recount to the doctor, who was kind enough not to press the issue. As it is, I’ve probably wandered too far away from the beginning of this post to wind my way back — sleep again beckons — but what I’d originally intended to write was that this morning I finally managed to log a couple hours of deep sleep, thanks to Crankenstein being up early for work and handling Muriel duty so I could stay in bed.
I might have slept a little too well, though, because I woke up with a sleep hangover, shaky and painfully rigid, my back and neck stooped, shuffling around in slow-motion. Conventional wisdom would attribute that to missing my first dose of levodopa and being low on dopamine, but for all we know I furiously jazzercised once I had the bed to myself, or danced on a whirling Busby Berkeley stage, or even contributed to the mayhem of a ballroom blitz.
* Maybe that recap, with its tale of triumph in the face of adversity — I successfully inflated our tires, which were low after a cold snap — caused my somnolence. (I’d lost the ability to inflate tires prior to starting levodopa; I was too clumsy, shaky and plodding.)
** I haven’t been a regular SNL viewer in decades. The last full episode I watched was hosted by Jane Lynch in 2010, an anomaly spurred by a love of Best in Show.
^ There was only one beheading, but that’s how the narration of my cult classic 1980s horror-comedy would begin.