"Dream a Little Dream of Me"

BigBadJohnny posted a blog regarding lucid dreaming. This is a subject that fascinates me. You see, I have very strange sleep habits, especially related to dreaming.

For starters, I suspect I have narcolepsy or some other sleep disorder that falls along those lines. A lot of people do not understand narcolepsy, and because of shows like Datline, they think that I will just fall asleep without warning. This isn't true, at least for me. That is actually cataplexy, and it refers to the sudden loss of voluntary muscle tone. Some narcoleptics have very severe cataplexy, and that's why they appear to just fall down sleeping. I don't do that. But cataplexy is one of the symptoms of narcolepsy, and I can point to lesser instances of it happening to me. Mostly, if I touch the couch, I am asleep. If I am in a car ride that lasts over 30 minutes, I am asleep (so I try to not drive long distances). That's why I am on the computer so much. I am keeping myself engaged so I don't go to sleep. I can sleep for 14 hours or more, and a few hours after waking up, I will be just as tired as I was the night before. Also, when I fall asleep, I drift in an out of sleep. I will be dreaming, and when I wake up, it is only a minute or two later than when I went to sleep, according to my bedside clock. This is not typical.

And that's one of the more normal things that happens to me regarding sleep. My dreams are enough to fill several textbooks. As I hinted in the above paragraph when I talked about dreaming for only a few minutes, I am a lucid dreamer. Except for me, it is constant. I always know when I am dreaming. I know that I am dreaming as soon as the dream starts. During non-REM sleep, I have no real thoughts of what is happening, but during dreams and REM sleep, I can tell what time it is within about 10-30 minutes. Rarely am I wrong.

Furthermore, I can change my dreams, although not as much as I used to be able to. I actually trained myself to NOT change them. You see, when I was young, I changed them for any reason. Anything to make them more exciting. Then I came to the realization that I could sort a lot of stuff out in my dreams, but if I changed them, I was just avoiding it. So, I trained myself to stop. Mostly anyway. Nightmares are changed, and as a result, I haven't had a nightmare in probably 15 years (more about this in a minute). If a dream is REALLY boring I will change it. One time I dreamed that I was putting tags back in the clothing at the store where I worked. After about 3 hours, it was too much, and I went on to a cooler dream.

Now, about the nightmares, you may not have caught it, but what you should be asking is how do I know that I haven't had a nightmare in that much time. Because I remember my dreams. Eventually I forget them simple because most aren't worth remembering. For example, last night I dreamed about my building most of the night. We were placing electrical wire in the upstairs. Dull, huh? I also dreamed about a farm. I don't own it, and I don't know where it was, but there wasn't really much going on there either.

And now, let's get REALLY bizarre. Let's say I dream of my immediate family. 4 people. Now, the person who looks like my husband will not always remain my husband. Sometimes, it will look my husband, but I will somehow *know* that it is my daughter. But the person who looks like my daughter will still be her too. Also, even though I say that it looks like them, it's more of a sense, because the people in my dreams have no faces. If you've seen the movie "What Dreams May Come" it is like that. Everyone is sort of blurry, and you can make them out, but not fine details. Only people are blurred. The landscape of my dreams is crisp and loaded with details. So, to recap- nobody looks like my husband, and even though this nobody looks like him it is really my daughter. Confused yet? It's simple enough to work out in real life. I see aspects in my daughter that remind me of my husband. Faces are unimportant because it is the personality of the person that is more essential.

Finally, I interact with the real world while I sleep. Not necessarily by kicking or punching. I guess a more accurate statement would be that the real world interacts with me while I sleep. If I am nudged, I feel it in my dream. Once I had a leg cramp and I dreamed that a dog was biting my leg. When women are pregnant, they often lose a lot of hair when they deliver the baby. When this happened with my daughter, I apparently swallowed a large mass of hair, because I dreamed that I ate a tarantula. lol.