Mike Napoli Has Been Having Some Pretty Interesting Dreams Since His Surgery
For those of you who were unaware, Mike Napoli suffered from sleep apnea for most of his life. The sleep apnea had gotten so bad this past year that it almost forced Boston’s first baseman into retirement.
Because of his sleep apnea, Napoli was never able to enter REM sleep, making it impossible to have dreams. The surgery required doctors to break his upper and lower jaw to then be adjusted forward, thus creating more space in his airway to breathe when he’s asleep.
After a successful — and extremely painful — procedure this past November, Napoli is finally able to sleep through the night, which means he is also finally able to have dreams. The 33-year-old described the first dream that he had after the surgery to WEEI.com’s Rob Bradford.
“I was roller skating with old school roller skates, headband, jean shorts, tank-top, old school earphones with the cassette player, skating through a city,” Napoli said. “Like dancing skating. Through cars, busses going by. I went by the Ritz and an NBA basketball team was checking into the hotel. Then all of a sudden I ended up being in a mall, skating around the mall, just dancing around and going around and around the mall.
“I woke up and told my friend Blacky, ‘You won’t believe this dream I just had.’ He said, ‘You had a dream?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it was the shit.’ I don’t know why I remembered it, but I did. I had to tell somebody. I don’t know why was roller skating seeing an NBA basketball team.”
Beyond being able to dream again, Napoli said that his workouts, obviously, have been much better since having the surgery. I wouldn’t underestimate the impact that a surgery like this could have on Napoli’s performance in 2015. As it is, he’s hitting .467 this spring (7-for-15), and went deep twice against the Pittsburgh Pirates on Saturday.
h/t Milmore on the pic.