What to text him while he's sleeping?

If he was messaging you normally during the day and stopped at a reasonable hour, the silence is ordinary. Most people sleep at night, and a late-night gap of six or eight hours tells you almost nothing. What matters more is the pattern over the last week. If he usually replies within a few hours and has been slower than that for days, the late-night text is not the problem to solve. The gap is.

Also look at the tone of your last exchange. If it ended on a warm note, he has no reason to avoid you and is probably just asleep. If the last thing you said was a question he never answered, sending something new while he is asleep will not change that. Answer the open question first, in daylight, rather than stacking a second message on top of it.

So the situation to diagnose is simple. Is this a normal night, or is something already off? Your text should fit whichever one it is.

Three kinds of message tend to fit this situation. The first is a short observation about something you did or saw that reminded you of him, with no question attached. It is for showing you were thinking about him and it reads as finished. The second is a brief sign-off that you are off to bed, which signals a bit of warmth and gives him an easy place to pick up when he wakes. The third is a light comment on something you both already share, such as a joke from earlier in the conversation, which gives him something to reply to without having to think of a new topic.

You can tell a draft fits one of these because it contains no real question, or only a yes or no question he can answer with one word. It should not ask him to plan anything, reveal how he feels, or confirm when he is free. Leave out any mention of waiting, checking his phone, or being unable to sleep. Those details turn the message into a request for reassurance.

Send the message when it would be normal for you to be texting him at all, which is usually the evening before he is likely to be asleep and not after you have been staring at the screen for an hour. A message sent at 1am reads as a late-night impulse. The same message sent at 10pm reads as a casual goodnight.

Once it is sent, leave it. If he replies in the morning, answer at a normal pace and let the conversation take its natural shape. If he does not reply by the next evening, that is information, and a second message is not the fix. One light follow-up a day or two later is reasonable only if the first message was clearly about something he would want to respond to. If you have sent two messages with no reply, stop. Give the next move to him and wait to see if he starts the conversation again. If he does not, the question is no longer about what to text while he sleeps.