What does my smartwatch tell me about the bedtime high? (Image by Kevin Curtin / Getty Images)

My girlfriend bought me an Apple Watch. I thought the gift meant something so sweet: that she didn’t want me to die. Because now, if I’m out on my bike and get struck by lightning in a rainstorm, my smartwatch will call an ambulance. As it turns out, this was actually a ploy to bring order to my ridiculously disorganized life.

The last time I wore a wearable tech device, it reported to my parole officer when I left the house at night. It turns out I really like wearing this watch, and I think it likes wearing me too. I use it as an instrument tuner and metronome, and the watch faces alternate between portraits of writers and musicians who inspire me. There are only two things I don’t like:

– It constantly alerts me when the ambient noise level is above 100 dB, like, “No shit, you think I don’t know I’m at band practice?”

– It makes me one of the most insufferable archetypes of the modern world: “Guy who just got a smartwatch.” It’s tragic. You get all this amazing data from the activity trackers, but you can’t tell a soul because – trust me – at a party, no one gives a damn that you took 12,000 steps today.

Perhaps the only revolutionary impact it has had on my life is its attention to my sleep – or lack of it. I have long had a complicated relationship with the Sandman. Early in my life, my active mind struggled with insomnia. Later, the aftershocks of trauma would cause me to wake up hyperventilating. Eventually, I settled into a minimalist sleep schedule of five to six hours, often aided by an evening cannabis hit.

I was afraid of what the babysitter on my wrist would tell me, but my sleep metrics were surprisingly positive. I seem to fall asleep almost immediately, rarely wake up, and get “quality” sleep almost all of the time.

So the other day, I was blabbing to my bandmates about how edibles, tinctures, and nightly bong hits made me an efficient sleeper, when the drummer shattered my illusions by observing, “But weed stops dreaming because it shortens REM sleep.”

Damn, he’s right. I almost never dream. And I remember when I used to do observational studies to test drugs, I often reported the side effect of vivid dreams. I later realized I was only dreaming because I couldn’t smoke weed.

I checked my numbers on the sleep app, compared them to my healthy sleep numbers, and found that my REM periods were shorter than average. That kind of shook me. The ancient Greek thinkers viewed dreams as something big: divine messages, dirty tricks, and valuable messages from hidden parts of the psyche. I began to wonder if I was an incomplete human being because marijuana had erased my dream world. An even more disturbing thought: Could shortening my REM cycles be affecting my cognitive abilities? I couldn’t dial the number of a sleep specialist fast enough.

I explained my concerns to Dr. Zachary Wassmuth, an ENT doctor who has published research on obstructive sleep apnea, and he reassured me.

“Unless you have sleep apnea, sleep is pretty much sleep,” he explained to me. “And if you sleep well, without obstructions and desaturations, REM sleep and deep Stage 3 sleep are similar – you can’t really control it anyway.”

Dr. Wassmuth acknowledged that an imperfect balance of REM to deep sleep likely accounts for only minor differences in how people feel during the day, and said one of the only ways to achieve that balance is to adjust medications…including cannabis. He stressed, however, that cannabis use is not a common cause of sleep problems among his patients.

“Sleep apnea is the big problem,” he says, pointing out that it increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. “If I treat 100 patients, 98 have sleep apnea and 2% have something else.”

This was reassuring for me, but I still decided to abstain from cannabis for a few days to observe the effects on my sleep. Sure enough, after three days, my REM sleep time had increased, but something less expected also happened: I had a dream.

An incredibly stupid dream.

“How did your sideburns grow so fast?” a dream version of my girlfriend asked me. I looked in the mirror and was surprised to see facial hair à la John Lennon in 1969. I kept going to the bathroom and shaving, only to have the sideburns grow back quickly before my eyes, in different styles – Lemmy Kilmister, Wolverine, Wilhelm the King of Prussia. I woke up drenched in sweat, touching my face in the dark.

I got out of bed, sat on the porch and smoked a pipe. The excitement of my dream world disappeared and I thought: If marijuana destroys my dreams, it’s no great loss.

Puff, puff, pass

Barbecue areas aren’t the only thing being smoked in Lockhart, where a bill to decriminalize cannabis will be voted on in November. Progressive activists Ground Game Texas and Mano Amiga led a campaign to collect enough signatures to put the Lockhart Freedom Act on the ballot, but then cried foul when City Attorney Brad Bullock chopped it up into 13 different ballot items. On Aug. 6, the Lockhart City Council voted to put it back on the ballot as a single ballot item. A decriminalization bill is also on the ballot in Bastrop, while Austin, Elgin, Denton and Killeen have already passed them.

Olympians Cannabis use was again banned at the 2024 Games. Top U.S. anti-doping official Travis Tygart sharply criticized the policy in a Yahoo Sports interview, hilariously declaring, “I think we should all be open and honest about the lack of performance-enhancing benefits of marijuana.” I guess he never watched that dressage event where you ride a horse that tap dances. Seriously, Olympic athletes are entitled to access cannabis for muscle relaxation and stress relief — and the World Anti-Doping Agency now has four years before the Olympics arrive in stoner metropolis LA with Snoop Dogg as the torchbearer.

Tim Walzthe Democratic vice presidential nominee, has a strong and extensive legislative record on cannabis reform, including supporting the Industrial Hemp Farming Act and the VA Medicinal Cannabis Research Act as a congressman and signing a legalization bill last year as governor of Minnesota. Harris and Walz are the party’s first leading candidates to support cannabis legalization.