In the company of snoozers
27th November, 2006
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One can't help but take it personally when the person to whom you are speaking falls asleep when you are in mid-sentence.
We'd been to dinner, the six of us, and had returned to a friend's place for postprandial refreshments. Glasses in hand, my wife and I were sitting chatting to a female member of our group when she raised her finger. I presumed she was about to disagree with what I was saying - people usually do - but instead her eyelids fluttered, her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped back onto the couch on which she had been perched. For one dreadful moment I thought she had suffered a heart attack. Or had I finally succeeded in boring someone to death? I'd been told by colleagues I had this potential but had never taken them seriously. Had my personality become a lethal weapon? I looked at my wife, who stared back at me. We both looked at the supine form and were about to scream for someone to ring an ambulance when her jaw dropped and she began to snore. Her snores, akin to the noise of a leaf blower when heard from a distance, alerted her boyfriend who wandered over, draped a blanket over her and walked away.
"That's quite a party trick you've got there," said my wife. "I've heard of people being put to sleep by hypnosis but I've never seen anyone talked into unconsciousness."
We'd begun the evening with six for dinner and now we were down to four, as we'd lost another member of our group on returning to my mate's place from the restaurant. We had walked in the door and, rather than proceeding to the lounge room, the lady of the house had turned left into a bedroom, executed a perfect head-first landing on the bed and remained missing in action for the rest of the evening. Obviously the stresses of the Christmas season already were beginning to wreak a toll on the populace. I myself passed out a few weeks ago, but could legitimately claim jet lag as an excuse. I got home from work at dusk, kissed my wife, sat down on the edge of the bed in suit, tie, shoes and socks and woke up two hours later, still fully dressed. The room was in total darkness and I knew neither where I was nor what day it was. I did three laps of the apartment before my wife calmed me down enough to realise I had been asleep for two hours and not two days. It made a change, at least, from passing out in front of the television. I once shared a table with a woman who passed out during dinner. I saved her from drowning in French onion soup by lifting her head out of her bowl and placing it on the table. The poor dear was as tired as a newt and slept soundly for the rest of the evening. In between bursts of snoring, I retold this story to my wife who began to yawn as I did so. "We should go," I said, and called a cab. "That was amazing the way that woman passed out. Her finger was still pointing at me when she hit the couch," I said to my wife on the way home. She would doubtless have agreed with me if she had not been sleeping soundly in her corner of the cab. Two out of two. I had the perfect score. I'd bored two women to sleep in the space of a single evening and the party season had barely begun. I wondered if I could make it to double figures by 25th December, as I was obviously on a roll. I thought I'd been passing out in front of the television in the evenings because I was tired but there had now emerged the very real possibility that I actually was boring myself to sleep. Perhaps if I stopped talking to myself it would help. |
