Ask The Professor 3

In a job lot of what I thought was interesting office ephemera I bought at an antiques auction, I found an archive of unpublished correspondence, obviously intended for magazine or journal publication that never came about. I present the second of these here without comment, except that in this one, the Professor gets snarky …

Dear Professor,

Why do I keep falling over when I get out of bed?

Larry.

Dear Larry,

Sometimes a letter comes across my desk that is so strange, so peculiar, that I wonder if our entire universe has suddenly sashayed at right angles into a new and completely different reality.

And then again, sometimes I get letters from losers like you.

Falling over, you say?  I suppose you’re looking for someone who takes the question seriously and pontificates about the possibility of local gravity anomalies in your bedroom, or small scale space/time curvatures in the carpet.

Well, you’re out of luck.  At a guess, oooh, I’d say it’s simply a case of being a complete klutz with feet the size of dinner plates, or perhaps it’s the heavy drinking the night before and an underperforming liver that’s responsible.

But, and this simply an indication of my inquiring mind, not an indication of giving you any credence at all, it could be an example of Vertical Bloodstream Imbalance, or VBI as we like to call it.

VBI occurs when sudden movement from a horizontal position displaces the large pool of blood that settles in your body while asleep, or “resting” as the experts might put it.  If you remain in a horizontal position for some time, the blood settles at the lowest point in your body.  When you rise suddenly, it sloshes like water in a bath tub, bouncing off various parts in your body, including the brain – and I use the term loosely in your case, of course.  The resultant shock can result in trembling, brief loss of consciousness and uncontrolled mambo dancing.  So, in theory, you could fall over.

My solution, my life challenged friend, is to tie yourself up every night.  Or simply not go to sleep at all.