Sleep Lab Technician

Sleep is a funny thing: You may be flying through outer space, climbing Mount Everest, or slaying dragons in your dreams, but while your mind is off on a great adventure, your body is decidedly silent, static, and still (save for the occasional snore, slobber, and shift!).

Because dreams are exciting, lots of people would love to watch what’s going on in your head while you sleep. It takes a special person, however, to want to watch what’s going on with your body. That person is a Sleep Lab Technician.

As a Sleep Lab Technician, sometimes called a Polysomnographic Technician, you watch people when they sleep. Not in their bedrooms, of course, but rather in a sleep lab, where Doctors and Somnologists send patients who suffer from sleep disorders such as insomnia, narcolepsy, sleep apnea, and periodic limb movement disorder, as well as strange sleep behaviors such as sleep walking, eating, and talking.

To diagnose and treat these conditions, Somnologists conduct sleep studies, which require patients to sleep overnight in a sleep lab, where they’re observed by you, the Sleep Lab Technician. More than just watching patients, you monitor them. Your duties therefore include setting up equipment — such as an electroencephalogram (EEG), which records patients’ brain activity while they sleep — applying electrodes and sensors to patients so you can measure their vitals, and then collecting data about patients’ body positions, brain waves, respiratory activity, and heart rates while they sleep.

Basically, you’re a sleep-themed Historian, paid to document sleep events so Doctors can find — and hopefully cure — the source of their patients’ sleepless nights.