My dad, Murray Moffat, is a sleep doctor. In 1982, he opened one of the first independent sleep laboratories in Canada. He became interested in sleep while working as a coroner. When he was called to a site, he would sometimes find a person in bed or on the couch, having died inexplicably in their sleep. It often appeared to be a coronary, but why, he wondered, were so many people having heart attacks in the night? At the time, sleep studies were mostly run in universities and hospitals, and my dad remembers them being performed in the halls of a Toronto psychiatric institute. He decided to set up a facility dedicated to diagnosing and treating sleep disorders.

As a kid, I imagined my childhood home as its own kind of sleep lab. The bedrooms had blackout blinds and mattresses with just the right firmness. At night, the temperature was a cool 68 degrees. Around the house, there were stacks of the journal Sleep and balls of knotted electrodes that my dad was always repairing for his actual sleep lab. It was a house wired for sleep and I was my dad's first lab "assistant." In our kitchen, he would hook me up with electrodes to practice the patient set-up and I'd help him string cables throughout the house, testing the computer networks for his lab. I watched him flip through test sleep records, each a paper tower of one thousand pages, as he scanned for renegade sleep patterns inked onto an accordion of crisp white paper.

Sometimes we would drive into Toronto, where he was setting up his sleep lab at the Medical Arts Building on Bloor Street. It had three bedrooms where his patients would soon sleep. Each headboard had an emerald-green box the electrodes were plugged into, and the bedrooms were soundproof. All you could hear was the soothing whir of cool air.

At the other end of a skinny hallway was the control area that housed three mammoth polysomnography (PSG) machines. Each had a shiny, stainless steel frame and a panel of knobs and switches that I resisted flicking back and forth for fear of shutting down the entire lab. Blank sleep records were fed into the PSGs, which inked the pages with scribbling pens. As patients slept, electrodes would send signals to the machines, recording their brain activity, movement, and breathing. I envisioned the lab as a cross between a hotel, with fresh sheets and towels, and a top-secret government facility tracking the secrets of the night.

I was there so my dad could make sure all the equipment worked properly. My father would watch the controls as I blinked and breathed in and out. Then he would leave me to do what I did best: sleep. Within minutes, my dreaming brain would transport me from the small bedroom to strange and unexpected places.

I still remember sitting next to my dad as he took me through my sleep record. He flipped through the accordion of crisp pages so fast that it seemed like the squiggly lines that had tracked my brain activity, breathing, and eye movement were moving. It reminded me of my homemade flip books of moving images, of flying birds and crashing waves.

Sleep and dreams have always been comforting to me. When I was a kid, I would fall asleep to escape bad turbulence on a flight or snowstorms as we drove across the Prairies to visit family. I would even fall asleep if I was bored. In dreams, there was so much to investigate and explore. I loved the freedom of letting my mind wander and pursue whatever wild thoughts I could imagine, unrestrained by the demands and distractions of the day. Dreaming was its own kind of freedom of thought and expression.

I grew up thinking and learning about sleep. It was the analog world of the eighties, long before sleep became its own industry with wearables and trending sleep hacks. When I was a kid, my parents dragged me and my brother across the States to see what other labs were doing. I moved on from my stint as a lab assistant, taking on a variety of jobs at the sleep lab. In high school and university, I did data entry and organized storage units of paper records. It was years before sleep records went digital, and we stored the paper records from the six-bed lab for ten years, which generated skyscraper-worthy stacks of paper.

One summer, my friend Katie Rodgers worked with me at the lab. One of our jobs was to transport the sleep records to storage units. We used to fill a Jeep with paper records until the old vehicle sagged at the back. Then we'd drive the country roads from the lab to the storage facility. I'll never forget the time that we were driving along, singing to Jane's Addiction, when I noticed a breeze coming from behind us. The hatch had sprung open, and I watched in my rearview mirror as thousands of pages fanned out into the night sky. It was the last run of the day. With only the Jeep's headlights to guide us, we ran across the country road, chasing after flying pages, dipping into gullies and sifting through weeds and wild grass to grab the paper chains of records. We rolled up the pages, stuffed it all into the Jeep and filled the storage unit with gigantic balls of paper. Somehow, we were able to retrieve every last record.