I'm 76, and for the last four months, my nights have been an absolute mess. It started subtly, a chill in the early morning hours, but now it's a full-blown drenching. I wake up, usually around 2:17 AM, give or take a few minutes, utterly soaked. My pajama top — always a crisp cotton button-down, usually light blue — is plastered to my chest, and the sheets feel like they’ve been dragged through a swimming pool. It’s not just sweat, mind you, it’s a cold, clammy kind of dampness that leaves me shivering despite the warmth of the room. I’ve checked the thermostat, moved the fan, even tried sleeping with fewer blankets, but the outcome is always the same. Three nights out of four, I’m peeling off wet clothes and dragging myself to the shower, just to feel clean enough to attempt another hour or two of sleep before the alarm for my executive role blares at 0500. This is impacting my work, naturally; my focus is shot by midday, and I've started making minor errors, which, for someone who prided themselves on precision, is rather humiliating. The peculiar thing is, the dreams themselves aren't overtly terrifying. They’re rarely nightmares in the classic sense. More often, they're vivid replays of mundane moments from my past – a particular staff briefing from my days in the Air Force, or the scent of damp earth after a monsoon in Southeast Asia. Sometimes it’s the sound of a particular engine, or the rhythmic squeak of a medical gurney in a field hospital. Nothing that would explain this physiological response, this sudden plunge into thermoregulatory dysfunction. I've considered everything from a nocturnal panic attack to some obscure endocrinological imbalance. My doctor, bless her patient heart, has run all the standard tests – thyroid, hormones, cardiac evaluations – and everything comes back "within normal limits," which is incredibly frustrating. It leaves me feeling like I’m manufacturing the problem, or perhaps, that my body is finally staging its own private rebellion after decades of rigid self-control. I suppose it’s the lack of control that’s truly unsettling. I’ve always been someone who could compartmentalize, who could pack away discomfort and push through. That was drilled into me, literally, from a young age, and reinforced through twenty-five years of military service. We learned to endure, to adapt, to never let the inner turmoil show. And for so long, it worked. I built a successful career, raised a family, maintained a semblance of order. But now, in the quiet solitude of the night, something has breached the perimeter. It’s as if my subconscious is finally forcing a confrontation, a physical manifestation of all the things I’ve carefully, meticulously, refused to examine. The absurdity of a retired senior executive, a man who once commanded hundreds, being utterly undone by a few liters of sweat, isn't lost on me. It makes me laugh sometimes, a bitter little chuckle in the dark, as I wring out another sodden pillowcase. And then the chill sets in again.