Pillows: Real and Imagined

I've been having some positional challenges while I sleep. For reasons I won't go into, my doctor advised me that whenever I am lying down, I should lie on my left side. When I do this, I need my back supported so that I don't roll onto my back in the middle of the night. This has led to a king-size-pillow barrier between me and Bill. Love you honey! I'll wave to you from way over here.

I also having been using a regular-size pillow to sort of do a combination support-the-belly plus between-the-knees thing. Not surprisingly, when I wake up, the pillows are nowhere near where I put them when I fell asleep. And it's hard, when you wake up in the middle of the night, to readjust all those pillows. In the dark. Half-asleep.

So I finally got a Snoogle yesterday. It's a pillow that's sewn into a pre-formed shape somewhere between a "C" and a "J" and you can hypothetically shape it many different ways. Behold (click to see the details):

Very promising when I went to sleep last night, because having that c-shape between your knees basically should prevents the long back support from shifting away from you. Theoretically.

Some time during the early morning, I woke up in a bit of discomfort from the neck portion. Did I also mention I have a pre-existing neck issue (herniated cervical disc - maybe C5 or C6? I forget which) that can be aggravated by side sleeping? Awesome. (In terms of pain management, I just wrapped up a month of PT, so at the moment I can once again turn my head. So I'm sticking with the side sleeping for now.) The snoogle is... not so great for my neck. The nice firm support for the back ends up being a bit firm for my head, and was sort of craning my head up a little too much. So I pushed the neck portion aside and pulled up the normal soft pillow I had tossed on the floor before falling asleep the night before.

But then the back portion was pushed away too. And somewhere in there, it came out from in between my knees? Anyway, I was having issues.

So in between snoozes on my alarm clock this morning, I have a dream. I dream that I have given birth to the baby, and isn't she (in the dream it's a she) adorable and just the sweetest thing, especially all bundled up and swaddled. She's soooo cozy and snuggle-able. So I'm snuggling with her, and maybe I start to snooze a little (in the dream), and I wake up a little bit later, quite well rested, and I can't find her. I'm searching through the sheets and comforter since it's all very fluffy, and a small bundle could be easily covered up and we wouldn't see her, but for all the fluff of the comforter (much the way our cat totally hides under the comforter and we don't even realize). So I finally find her... and I have used her as my pillow. And yes she has died because I have accidentally smooshed her to death from SLEEPING ON HER, but she sure was a comfortable pillow.

Horrifying.