Sleeptalking

My girlfriend has told me that I'll occasionally talk in my sleep (nothing entirely coherent, by all accounts, but she admits that she's normally half asleep when it happens) and occasionally snore (though apparently not as much since we've had our new mattress and a couple of new pillows). Meanwhile, she fidgets like crazy in her sleep, and occasionally twitches quite violently. Only a few days ago, she woke up in the early hours of the morning with an intense cramp in her leg, quite probably due to one such muscular spasm.

But nothing could have prepared me for what happened in the early hours of this morning.

She woke me up... by giggling.

I should put this in some context: Over the last year, she's been having a terrible time with the first year of her Open University degree. She'd purposely selected some quite random subjects (Mental Health, Geology, Archaeology, Planetary Science) as a break from the Physics she'd spent the last few years focussed on - kind of a clean break from her second attempt at studying at Imperial College, which had done her mental health and self-confidence no favours at all. Trouble was, the OU turned out to be not much better. The subjects were not as interesting as she'd hoped, and the way her progress was assessed seemed at odds with what little I know of higher education: everything seemed to want her focussed on the course materials, not researching beyond it. This led to frustration, and difficulty keeping her attention on the work, which led to anxiety about "not doing enough", which then exacerbated the problems which had given rise to the anxiety, thus exacerbating the anxiety itself.

It has been quite horrible to watch at times, with spasms, much agitated shaking of her hands, recoiling from any sudden movements - even attempts at hugs - self-recrimination, stammering, aversion to making decisions, constant, heart-breaking repetition of "I'm sorry"... basically, a whole shopping list of depression/anxiety symptoms... but I've done what I can to keep her calm, to encourage her, and to give her the benefit of my dubious, uneducated 'wisdom', particularly my philosophy that one learns far more from one's failures than from any number of successes, and so it's always best to embrace a failure and use it to one's advantage in every way is possible. And throughout the year, her grades have either stayed more or less stable, or improved markedly thanks to the feedback she's received on her assignments.

But as the exams drew closer, the anxiety really took hold. One of the side effects of her anxiety medication has been some exceptionally vivid (and occasionally quite nasty) dreams. Over the last couple of months, things have been so bad that she wakes up more exhausted that she was the night before - which, naturally, makes studying harder, which ramps up the anxiety even further - and, having virtually weaned herself off caffeine, she got straight back into drinking tea, coffee and cola just to keep herself awake during the day.

Her first exam was yesterday and, as far as we know, it went OK. She didn't have a panic attack, she was able to write, certainly completing a sufficient quantity of text, so it's only the quality that remains to be seen. While very little of the stuff she was hoping for came up, she was able to remember the stuff that did come up... and she hasn't seemed overly stressed since, aside from the odd twitch.

So when I was woken up in the early hours of the morning by the sound of her giggling, I was curious to know what was funny. I don't remember her exact response, but the gist of it was "It's a Google Mail template... No, no, not GMail..." with that last bit accompanied by the familiar agitated shaking of her hands. Being half asleep, I struggled to make sense of this utterance but, having thought it through, I realised it didn't make any sense, so I asked her if she had been laughing about something that happened in a dream.

"No," she said, most insistently, "I don't think so." And with that, she was fast asleep.

I asked her about it when I got home from work today, and she had no recollection of the incident whatsoever...