This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/turtlefrigo on 2026-05-27 22:22:35+00:00.

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I downloaded a sleep recording app for the first time and I wish I could take it back.

I’d been having trouble sleeping for the past few weeks. In the beginning, I didn’t think much of it. I’d blink myself blearily awake to darkness and then slip into someplace darker several seconds later.

Until it started becoming more and more difficult to fall back asleep. Each time I surfaced, I would strain for that familiar dark serenity only for it to slink farther away. Gradually, I started being roused in the middle of the night by the skin-crawling sensation of being watched, which made no sense considering I lived alone.

My apartment was small enough that I could see nearly all of it from my bed. Kitchenette against the wall. Tiny dining table beside the window. Narrow hallway leading toward the bathroom, closet, and front door.

Nothing ever looked out of place, despite the nights that I would wake abruptly with the overwhelming certainty that there was a presence just beyond the bedroom doorway. Shadows started forming shape when I stared too long into the hallway, so I stopped.

But the feeling that I wasn’t alone didn’t.

During nights like those, I could only resort to staring at the back of my eyelids, listening to the droning hum of my refrigerator until the chittering of the birds perched outside my window signalled that it was time to get up for work.

They started sounding like they were laughing at me.

Honestly, the worst part wasn’t even the exhaustion. It was the humiliation of functioning only semi-aware all the time, like I was waddling through a brain fog.

At work, I kept forgetting conversations.

A colleague frowned at me as we loitered near the coffee machine after our weekly meeting. “You alright?”

“…Yeah? Why?”

“You already asked me that ten minutes ago. Like, two times.”

I laughed it off. It probably would’ve been even more unprofessional to add that I had absolutely no memory of even speaking to him earlier.

Another time, my manager thanked me for volunteering to stay late on Thursday. Apparently I had insisted, but I don’t remember any of that either. Surely I wasn’t that masochistic.

"Could be the stress,” my friend Flavie suggested when I brought it up during dinner.

We were slurping phở inside a Vietnamese restaurant which we’d booked a few days prior. Well, she was, at least, and happily at that. I’d been excited to come to Belleville after so long, except now I could only summon enough strength to stare unseeingly into my bowl.

My distorted yet visibly weary face rippled across the soup, peering back at me with shadowed eyes through stalks of wilting beansprouts.

“Maybe,” Flavie continued to mumble through her mouthful, propping her chopsticks on the edge of her bowl as she leaned back in her chair and turned her full attention to me, “you should take a few days off of work.”

“Can’t,” I sighed. “I already took enough breaks in May.” One of the greatest advantages that came with working in France, truly.

“Don’t you have those melatonin gummies?”

“Does it look to you like they’re working?”

“Well, no—so take more?”

I grimaced. “That’s not how it works—also I always end up with the weirdest dreams when I do that, and I feel nauseous waking up.”

Speaking of which, I couldn’t even recall a single detail from any recent dreams I’d potentially had.

"Remember Théo? From sociology?” She ignored my blank stare and carried on, “Anyway, he mentioned before that he started using this sleep recording app because he would wake up with this sharp pain in his jaw or something like that, so he figured that there was something going on in his sleep. Turns out he was grinding his teeth and going at it real hard. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Apparently he sounded like a goat choking on marbles.”

“I don’t grind my teeth.”

Flavie rolled her eyes. She reached for her cup of chè ba màu and I watched the beans and pandan jelly twirl inside the glass as she took a sip.

“Obviously I don’t think it’s going to magically fix your problem,” she said as she set it back down. “It’s just something you can try to see if you’ve been doing anything unusual in your sleep, and if you locate whatever it is that has been affecting your sleeping pattern—I dunno, maybe you’ll find a way to improve your sleep quality. Somehow. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt to try, right?”

“I don’t talk in my sleep.”

She fixed me with a deadpan gaze to which I flashed an appeasing smile in return. “Girl, you don’t know that. I’m just saying, whatever you’re going through isn’t exactly normal. You’ve always slept like a dog—”

“Log, not dog—”

“—You really should go get it checked when you can. But in the meantime, like I said, the app is just something you can try to play with.”

In my bowl, my eye-bags were so dark they looked like another set of eyes nestled underneath my original pair. I swirled the rice noodles with my chopsticks until the ripples shattered my reflection.

Despite myself, I downloaded the app that night upon returning home.

It helped that the app itself was free and looked forgettable. Black and white icon. Minimalist interface. No reviews. Flavie was right; it wouldn’t hurt to try.

The first night, the app didn’t record anything. The second night produced my first recording, which was almost funny when I played it.

02h44 : ‘Suspicious,’ muttered my voice. ‘Very suspicious.’

Silence.

I snorted. How insightful.

The next night was different; the recordings were suddenly much longer.

03h10 : ’I don’t like coffee without sugar.’

03h10 : ‘Coffee with condensed milk is even nicer.’

03h13 : ’I should stop drinking coffee so late at night.’

Now, that…I had to admit I was a bit unsettled by that. Not only was I speaking in complete sentences, in a voice that was clear and alert, but I also sounded conversational and curious.

Still nothing to be truly alarmed about, though. I texted Flavie about it and she found it funny.

I kept using the app from then on. Some nights there was nothing, but most nights the app recorded me rambling absolute nonsense.

04h05 : ‘Name.’

04h05 : ‘No. Mine.’

04h06 : ’My name?’

04h07 : ’Good. Very good.’

As nonsensical as the recordings were, my sleep actually improved somehow despite no particular change in routine on my part. Nonetheless, I started falling asleep within ten to fifteen minutes, and stayed unconscious throughout the entire course of each night. I was ecstatic to notice the progress and became slightly obsessed with checking the recordings first thing every morning. It almost felt like I was excited to go to sleep.

The recordings continued.

03h03 : ’Flavie is my best friend.’

03h04 : ’Flavie is so nice and pretty. I like her so much.’

To that, Flavie responded ‘ewww’ with a dozen vomiting emojis, which meant she was really pleased.

02h45 : ‘I can télétravailler this Friday.’

04h11 : ‘I start my period next week.’

05h32 : ‘Six…seven...’

I began to notice something a little bizarre, though, but I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining it. The thing was that my voice always sounded the same, meaning that it was my own voice, of course—but there was something slightly odd about the cadence and tone.

It was too deliberate. As though every word, every sentence, had been scripted before being spoken. I was sleep-talking with crystal-clear pronunciation, sometimes in Mandarin, mostly in English, and other times in French—and I always sounded like I was actually awake. Except I must’ve been fully asleep.

One night, the recordings suddenly became…weird.

03h25 : ‘What do you want me to say?’

03h35 : ‘You keep interrupting me too early.’

04h01 : ‘Stop it...’

04h02 : ‘Stop listening…’

04h04 : ‘STOP ! ! I SAID STOP IT ! ! ! !’

I flinched so violently my phone almost leapt from my grasp. I turned off the app and stared at the sunlight filtering through my shutters as my heart pounded away.

What the hell. I didn’t even know I could sound like that. Like a banshee. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t woken myself with a screech as loud as that.

In hindsight, I probably should’ve deleted the app after that one instance.

But I didn’t—because I was curious, or, I don’t know, masochistic—but I wanted to keep using it. Just so I could get my own piercing shriek out of my head.

05h04 : ‘I’m tired from getting up so early every day.’

05h04 : ‘What do you want me to say?’

05h08 : ‘Stop resisting.’

I still didn’t delete the app after that, but I stopped listening to the recordings. I didn’t think the problem lay within the app. After all, it was simply a tool that recorded me sleep-talking.

Yet my sleep quality instantly deteriorated to the state that it had been in a few weeks ago.

I was waking up in the middle of the night or at the crack of dawn again, and whenever I fell back asleep—if I was even lucky enough for that to happen—the sensation felt akin to being wrenched roughly underwater, before I would startle awake a few hours or a few minutes later with a full-body jerk, without feeling like I’d had any real reprieve. My face ached often, too, my cheeks and jowl sore.

Maybe it really was the stress.

So I went to see a general practitioner, just to have her tell me that she didn’t detect any abnormalities and recommend me to stop drinking coffee altogether for a few days. Which seemed sort of counterintuitive since I was so exhausted these...

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