You never really know much about how you sleep until you start sleeping in the same bed with someone for a period of time. Take me, for example. I’ve never been told that I snore, talk in my sleep, sleepwalk, or anything like that. I assumed that I curl up on my side, eventually roll over onto my back, and stay like that without moving for pretty much the whole night.

I go to sleep much earlier than David does, so he tucks me in at night and then comes to join me a few hours later. Most of the time I don’t even notice when he gets in bed. But the other night I vaguely remember rousing to him shaking me and saying my name.

“What is it?” I mumbled.

“Nothing,” he replied. “I thought…you don’t want to know what I thought. I thought you were dead!” And then he gave me a big hug. I was so tired that I drifted off again right away, but I remembered enough of it to ask him about it later.

He thought I was dead when he came in the room because I was frozen in an unnatural position. He said that my arms were in the air, as if I was trying to climb something. They were just stuck there: not as if I was having a dream about climbing and my arms were moving, but as if I had already undergone rigor mortis in that position. And he shook me at least three times before I finally responded.

Apparently it’s not the first strange position he’s found me in. Next time, I hope he takes a picture!