In recent months my sleep pattern seems to have had a wobble. I’ve put it down to working at irregular times which has the knock on effect on the time of day I’m supposed to be sleeping.

I’ve been experimenting with various android apps on my phone all supposed to measure sleep and help with getting a better understanding on issues to aid a better sleep. My current favourite is SleepBot which does motion and sound measurement with a ‘smart alarm’ designed to wake you at the right time so you feel refreshed. I did try ‘Sleep as Android’ which supposedly measures ‘sleep cycles’ and amount of REM and deep sleep, but it didn’t tell me any more than SleepBot. In fact it’s a pay-for app and if you want analysis you pay for that separately (except you can’t trial the latter to see if it gives anything useful). So I’ve returned to the free app whilst I do a bit more research.

Thus far I’ve determined.

1. I do go to sleep
2. I wake up periodically
3. I don’t say a lot over night except when I knock the phone on the floor and bang my head on the bedside table trying to retrieve it where I used lots of “post-watershed” language.

I knew most of that before I installed the app.

After the in-shock period last summer when I was plagued with nightmares I’ve not remembered much in the way of dreams since. I did have a very strange dream involving a road-race. Strange in the first place because I’ve never dreamt about running at all.

I forget where this race was supposed to be – it was far out in the countryside somewhere, but nowhere I recognised. I parked up and had to walk up an incline to a sports centre. The weather was wet and cold, but not desperately so. There were a few others around me. We walked up the hill and turned back on ourselves to approach the centre. I could see across towards where I’d walked up, and could see others following – it seemed like a big crowd. Anyway, getting  into the centre yielded a place with steps all around the place – not ideal for sport (unless step-aerobics is your thing) and on registering it appeared to be a 10k which wasn’t what I’d signed up for – it was supposed to be a half-marathon!

There was a strange element of dream deja-vu where I seemed to be recalling the location from something previous (I did say it was all odd!) and then the race started but there were only about 24 of us in the race. Cue a lot of running up stairs out of the centre and off into long streets where the race was abruptly cancelled…..!

The dream faded away with me trying to confirm why the race wasn’t the length I’d expected – seemingly the fact it was cancelled mid run for no apparent reason was less relevant…….!

Away from the land of nod, the kitchen is very much work in progress. The electrician discovered a few wiring horrors when he came to add the extra sockets but at least now it conforms to Revision 17 (compared to Bob the Bodger does DIY). Ceiling and wall reskimmed and some of the unit carcasses are in place.

But it’s far from being a kitchen (I’m living on takeaways at the moment as I have no means of cooking) and the cat is maxed out on valium for the stress of his house being pulled to pieces by the builder he’s demonised! Such is life in this household at the moment.