I woke up with a start when my husband’s left arm whacked me in the head. I rolled over to yell at him and saw that he was sound asleep. His hands, however, were wide awake and keeping a perfect 3/4 time to some mystery concerto.

Sadly, this was not the first time this has happened. My husband works in the music industry and like most husbands, he has a tendency to take his work to bed with him. For us, this means he goes to sleep dreaming of music. Sometimes I wake up to the sound of him humming in his sleep, which, truthfully, can be kind of cute if not for the fact that he wakes me out of a dead sleep humming. But the other, less cute thing he does in his sleep is conduct. And things can get dicey when he is working on a big orchestral piece and I happen to be sleeping in the string section.

After my husband whacked me, I rubbed my forehead and wondered if I should interrupt the symphony and tell the players to take five, or roll over and go back to sleep. I watched for a minute and saw his hands start to slow down. I wasn’t sure if the piece he was conducting had become more allegro or if one of the horn players had screwed up and they were trying it again.

Deciding the conducting coast was clear, I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. But just as I dropped off, I got another blow to the head.

“Okay Maestro, concert’s over!” I barked at my husband, shaking his shoulder.

His eyes popped open.


“You’re conducting in your sleep again!” I exclaimed.

He snorted. “I was not.”

“You were, and you whacked me in the head twice!” I responded. “Could you switch to a more sedate piece of music?”

He laughed.

“It’s not funny. I didn’t know orchestral music was a contact sport. Couldn’t you just snore like other husbands?”

While I was clearly not a fan of being whacked in the head by my husband in his sleep, I suddenly realized that there might actually be an untapped resource in his sleep conducting. If he could conduct in his sleep, why couldn’t he do some other things that would be infinitely more productive? Maybe we could get him to dream about home repairs and have him fix the broken garage door in his sleep. Or change the lightbulbs in the bathroom. Or even take out the garbage. He could sleep-chore his way through all the things he complained about doing when he was awake. It was genius.

“I’m going back to sleep,” he said groggily.

A few minutes passed and then I heard my husband’s breathing get more rhythmic and I knew he was asleep. I leaned in close to him and began to chant softly into his ear.

“Garage door. Garage door. Garage door.”

“Garage door,” he murmured.

“Yes, garage door. Fix the garage door,” I said softly.

“Good plan,” he said loudly. “And if you’re going down to the garage you might want to grab a bike helmet in case I whack you again.”