Friday, December 22, 2006

More on my sleep obsession

I used to have a baby who slept through the night (and by "slept through the night" I mean 8-10 hours in a row without waking up). I don't know what happened to him. Looking back over my log book I see that he actually was never sleeping through the night every night for more than a few nights in a row. He still did have bad nights sprinkled in with the good, but this last week has been all bad. In the week starting the eighth he slept 8+ hours in four out of seven nights, but in this last week he hasn't done it once.

On the night of the 15th he went to sleep at 10:30 pm, woke up at 4 and didn't go back to sleep until 5:30, then slept until 8. The next night he went to sleep at 10pm woke up at midnight, didn't go back to sleep until 1:45 and slept until 8:45. The night of the 17th he went to bed just before 9pm, woke up briefly at 9:30, then slept until 5:15, and then back to sleep from 6 until 9:15. The night of the 18th he fell asleep at 9pm, woke up briefly at 9:30, again briefly at 12:30 and then for good at 5:30. I could go on, but this is probably not interesting to anyone but me. As I've mentioned before, I am obsessed with sleep.

I was thinking of creating a visual representation of my son's sleep by creating an image where each pixel represented five or fifteen minutes -- thinking of a square image as a grid with time across the top and days down the side -- and then coloring the pixel black if we was sleeping during that time and leaving it white if he was awake. I wonder what that would look like.

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