As It Turns Out, I'm Only a Little Crazy

My relationship with sleep is a long and tortured one. I've tried meditation, therapy, and relaxation tapes, to name a few, but nothing ever really works consistently. It's the whole cycle of not being able to sleep, then worrying about how I'm going to function if I don't get to sleep, then calculating how much I'd get if I fell asleep RIGHT NOW, which so obviously isn't going to happen because it's two in the morning and I'm doing math for Christ's sake.

My routine is this: a few nights of insomnia, followed by exhaustion, followed by a Tylenol PM, and then I start the cycle all over again. It's not the end of the world -- I can function on not much sleep if alcohol isn't factored into the equation.

The thing about sleep aids is that they often result in weird dreams. A couple of weeks ago, while passed out on the couch in the middle of Dexter, I heard a woman's voice fill the apartment.

"Battery low," she said in a robot voice. I assumed I had been dreaming and woken up, and fell back asleep.

"Battery low," came the voice again. In my Tylenol PM haze, I was too zonked to get up and again, assumed it was all in my head.

"Battery low," she said a third time. I thought hard about where the sound could be coming from. It was too loud to be from my landlord's apartment upstairs. To my knowledge, I had not purchased anything that runs on batteries and talks to me. Maybe the smoke alarm? It looked pretty ancient. I fell back to sleep while I was trying to figure it out, and the woman's voice stopped. That or I slept through it.

The next morning, I assumed it had been a pill-induced dream state and forgot about it. The cats didn't seem disturbed, so obviously it had happened within the confines of my own head. Or that's what I thought. Until today.

"Battery low," I heard as I was trying to haul my ass out of bed at 7:00 to work on Cosmo. I jumped out of bed and ran toward the sound. Nothing. Then I heard a beep. Then another beep. I followed the beeps, and found a high-tech fire alarm that hadn't as yet been hung anywhere. I picked it up.

"Fire!" it said. "Fire! Fire!" I sniffed the air. No fire. I assumed that since her "low battery" cries had gone unanswered, she was pulling out the big guns. I removed the batteries. John Brown hid under the dining room table and stayed there for the better part of the morning. He believed her when she said "fire," I think.

The good news is, once I get new batteries for it and hang it up, it might just save my life. No way am I going to sleep through some lady robot screaming "Fire!" at me, Tylenol PM or no Tylenol PM.