About a month ago I apparently unplugged my phone from its extension cord, a difficult and unnecessary thing to do, while sleeping. An app was playing, so by morning, the battery had run down. The alarm didn’t go off, and I missed my Saturday morning workout.

This is what I’ve been wanting to talk to you about, my friends: sleep apps, and why I’m going to run the other way if one gets near me.

The night of The Unplugging, I’d fallen asleep to the sound of a bonfire on the beach, my favorite selection on the sleep/meditation/relaxation app I’d been playing nightly. Fading out of consciousness to the sound of a crackling fire and waves crashing faintly in the background had been bliss, but there’d been a few contradictory incidents. Sometimes I woke up in the night as if disturbed by this sound that I found so pleasant.

On at least one occasion, I got out of bed and turned off the app, fully aware as I did it. On at least three other occasions, I woke up to my alarm but found that my bonfire on the beach had somehow been replaced by other soundscapes, ones that I didn’t like.

Now there was this strange new twist: Sometime during the night, the phone had been unplugged from its extension cord. How?

How did this happen?

I must have done it, but I can’t begin to guess why. If I wanted to stop the app, well, there are many ways to go about silencing a phone. I could have done it the way I’d done before, which was to simply get up and turn off the app. If silencing the phone was what I wanted to do, then why didn’t I just do that? I also could have:

Hit pause.
Turned the media volume all the way down.
Turned off the phone.
Unplugged the phone from its charger.
Unplugged the extension cord from its easily accessible outlet in the wall.

But no. Instead, I (presumably) went to the wall and placed my right shoulder against it and twisted my body sideways so I could reach down with my right hand into the narrow space between the shelving unit and the wall to grab for the extension cord, pull it up, and unplug the phone adapter – differentiating between the adapter and the lamp plug that was also connected to the extension cord – in the dark of night, in my sleep, using my disabled left hand (that can’t grasp) to firmly grasp the extension cord while pulling the adapter out with my right hand. I woke up with no recollection of having done any of it. All I had was a dead phone, a missed workout, a friend I’d stood up, and a lot of questions.

The idea of having done such a thing in my sleep – with no memory of having done it – is downright spooky, and not in a good way.

I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. As far as I know, I don’t sleepwalk. I find the notion of engaging in the whole operation of unplugging my phone from its extension cord in my sleep to be so outlandish that it’s easy to doubt that I even did it at all. It had to have been me, though, because if not me, than who?

1). Theory one: Nenette.
The chances of Nenette accidentally unplugging the phone adapter from the extension cord are less than 0. I have a better chance of getting eaten by a shark in Kansas.

2). Theory two: Another human.
Someone broke into the house without waking me up, crept into my bedroom, retrieved the extension cord from behind the shelving, unplugged the phone from the extension cord, and left.

3). Theory three: Aliens.
Because when the question is weird tech-related events in the night, the answer is always aliens.

4). Theory four: An energy, perhaps the same one that caused the post-it note to skitter across my desk last week.

It had to have been me.

Thinking back to the times I’d woken up to sounds other than the one that I chose, I have to wonder what, exactly, I’d been hearing at the time that I unplugged the phone. What was it about the sounds that prompted my sleeping brain to get my body up and active in performing the complex series of steps involved in disconnecting the phone adaptor from the extension cord? It would’ve been painful, too, because of my hand. What subliminal messages might the app have been feeding me?

These thoughts sent my mind out on a whole sleep-app conspiracy theory expedition. I didn’t come to any conclusions, but I haven’t used the app since.

In any event, one way or the other, I ended up getting more sleep, and I didn’t further injure myself, as I might have if I’d done my workout. An intervention had been staged in some sort of way. As good of a thing this may have been, I’m seriously done with sleep apps. I don’t know what exactly I’m hearing at night, nor do I understand how the brain takes and processes messages.

On that note, I’m going to bed. No apps will be playing.

Have a lovely night or day yourselves, friends. Stay safe!