My Sleep App Recorded Three Voices In A Room With One Person

I am a boring man with a boring problem: I snore, my ex complained, and now I record myself out of habit even though there is nobody left to complain.

The app keeps clips. On 12 October it flagged a segment as SPEECH DETECTED, forty minutes of it, between 02:11 and 02:51. I live alone in a second-floor flat with the windows shut because of the road.

The clip is mostly nothing. Fabric. My own breathing, which is horrible, and I am sorry for anybody who has had to sleep next to it. Then, twice, there is a voice that is not mine, saying something with the cadence of a question, and — this is the part that made me put the phone face down on the counter and walk around the block — a second voice that answers in the same flat, patient tone. Neither of them sounds excited. They sound like two colleagues doing an inventory.

I have listened maybe two hundred times. I can't make out a language. My cousin, who does audio for weddings, ran it through her software and said it is not TV bleed, because there is no compression signature, and it is not the neighbours, because it is too close to the mic.

And here is what I have to tell you, even though it makes me sound like exactly the person I have spent my life not being: I had the dream that night. The one I have had four or five times since I was twenty-eight. A room the colour of a dead television, no corners, and someone standing behind my head where I cannot turn to look, being very gentle with me, the way you are gentle with a nervous dog.

In the dream I always try to say a name and I always get one syllable out.

At 02:39 on the recording, my own voice says one syllable. Very clearly. It is not a word in any language I speak.

I have not deleted the file. I have also not sent it to anyone but my cousin, because I know exactly what the internet does with things like this, and I would rather keep my forty minutes than become a thumbnail.

I sleep with the light on now, which changes nothing, and I know that, and I do it anyway.