Dream without Sleeping
Do I dream too much? Or not enough?
I’m behind on sleep this summer and I find it hard to make up for it.
My insomnia, which only appeared in my life after Covid arrived, arrives and leaves inconsistently, like a neighbor showing up to drop off borrowed lawn equipment in the middle of the night.
I know a healthy sleep schedule is so important. I love to sleep. Bedtime is also when I do most of my reading: before falling asleep, whether around 9:30pm as scheduled or, like last night, at 2am, when the house and world are quiet.
Often sleeping-in to catch up on sleep isn’t an option. Because what I’m doing now - getting up first thing and writing - is the top priority for my day. And it needs to happen before all the chaos of the Real World starts banging on my door.
It’s the promise I’ve made.
It’s the dream I’m following.
The Usual Suspects
I crawl into bed around 930pm and read for 15-30 minutes, depending on my energy levels. It’s generally the only time I read, so I’m always bouncing between three books: fiction, non-fiction, and a TTRPG.
I read until the words wobble a bit, get blurry and stop remembering what I just read. I check how long until a chapter break - if it’s less than a page I try to soldier on to finish it, but very soon I’ll close the book and turn off the light.
Goodnight.
Sleep itself is fine, and I remember some of my dreams. They usually represent something or someone that I’ve been thinking about. I’m not as anxious or stressed as I used to be, thanks to meditation and my recovery program, but I find that whomever or whatever is on my mind right before I fall asleep often finds their way into my dreams.
And if I’ve been undisciplined and looked at Facebook before bed (naughty), then some rando will wander through my dreams because I saw their post earlier. I recently dreamt of a guy from high school, who I barely know but we share a lot of “real” friends, that was opening a restaurant in Petaluma and I was helping him bake cookies.
Mmmmm cookies…
This is just to say that sometimes I dream of you. Yes, you, literally reading this. I think about this newsletter a lot and if you’ve given me any sort of feedback or supported me in any way, you may have wandered through my imagination at some point and ended up in a dream.
So thank you for helping with my dreams.
REM Live
After attending a big stadium concert last week (subject of a future post), my friend and I were discussing rock performers that we never saw live. I never saw REM perform live, and never will, after Peter Buck recently announced there will never be a proper reunion.
One more missed performance that will remain unfulfilled.
More importantly, our growing understanding is that REM sleep is where the juice really is. Where the healing and processing still happens.
Sleep science is still so new and we know so very little. I wish we took the time and money to lean into learning more about sleep instead of, I don’t know, invading another country only to deny that our people are dying there.
Another dream unfulfilled.
In the little we know, REM sleep is apparently the key ingredient to good sleep health, with all other sleep in a supporting role. This is why when we’re sleep deprived, we usually drop right into REM and start dreaming right away - our body grabs what it can whenever possible.
Sometimes I wake to an alarm but haven’t completed a full sleep cycle, so my head is groggy all morning, coffee be damned. I muddle through the morning until lunch, and then find time for a 20 minute nap ASAP.
I know I’ve got sleep debt when I instantly drop into REM sleep and ride a wave of crazy dreams for those 20 minutes, then come out without an alarm, my body thankful for a chance to dream again.
My body and mind need me to dream, no matter what everyone else wants.
Please, can we dream again?
Waking Life
The 2001 Richard Linklater film Waking Life is one of my all-time films, but it’s certainly not for everyone. My wife hated it. My sister was like wtf.
But I loooooooooooooved it. Saw it in the theater three times. Watched in on DVD numerous times. I still have both the movie and soundtrack on DVD and CD, respectively, both having survived multiple purges of physical media.
I love it because it tells the story of dreams and dreaming and is bold in its approach both visually and thematically. It’s an experimental movie and not for everyone. This was back when Linklater was alternating between art movies (like his well-known Before Sunrise series) and commercial successes like Bad News Bears and School of Rock. And then his artistic masterpiece Boyhood that somehow is both artistically and commercially perfect.
Waking Life, however, does not mean to make sense as a traditional movie narrative, and I always loved that it wanted to represent dreams and dreaming in a way that could not be clearly articulated as a “normal” film. It’s a wild movie to watch - ground-breaking animation aside - and all of the pieces come together to pull the viewer out from any structure and forces them to float along uncomfortably in this dream world where there are only questions, no answers.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled does something similar in a frustrating fictional narrative that goes both everywhere and nowhere at once. People need dreams, need to dream.
But the why and how remain ever-elusive.
We understand so little about dreams and dreaming, yet they are with us every day.
Sometimes, when my insomnia is really acting up and I’m too tired to sleep - I’ve been up for hours and it’s still the middle of the night, so I can’t just get out of bed and start my day, but my brain is done with reading and feeling sleepy but still somehow not ready to sleep…
I am awake, conscious, lying in bed and fully aware of my surroundings…
But also I dream… the images flit and float about my head… I slip in and out of dreams, my mind so desperate to get on with recovering from the day, regardless of where my body is…
I see places and people far from me, collapsed and consolidated, pictures and ideas both foreign and friendly, ideas and regrets and anxieties and hopes all mushed together, right before my eyes.
All my past and future lives swirling around…
I travel to distant lands, see unexplored colors and forbidden exchanges and worlds that I was not meant to understand… The visions come hard and fast.
My mind electric…
Sometimes this turns to sleep, my body exhausted, finally, from fighting it. I collapse into darkness, into rest.
Sometimes I wake from this, involuntarily startled and still in my bed, still waiting for sleep.
What was that about?
One of my engineering classes was about the aesthetic and creative process, and we talked about trying to access your brain imagery from those in-between states when you're falling asleep. Could be inspirational- sweet dreams!
I'm going to have to find Waking Life and watch it. I almost never dream - or at least remember them. The ones I do remember are horrible terrifying and all too realistic. I have insomnia like the classic ADHD person: not much trouble going to sleep, but if I wake up in the night enough for my brain to kick in, I'm a goner. sigh.