No One Wants to Hear What You Dreamt About Unless You Dreamt About Them
But I'm not going to let that stop me.
I've never been a very good sleeper, but I occasionally get bouts of severe insomnia. Where I can't seem to get thirty minutes of sleep in a row. Just some fitful dozing and a lot of flopping around and kicking the covers and generally making a nuisance of myself in bed. More than the usual flopping nuisance I am in bed, that is.
This is not a good condition to be in. But it occasionally has some hilarious side effects.
The most obvious of these hilarious consequences results from the narcolepsy that inevitably accompanies a long stretch of insomnia. After six weeks or so of sleepless nights, I will fall asleep on the bus or the subway. I once fell asleep and rode to the end of the line on the last bus of the day. I was stuck in a part of town I'd never been in and where there didn't seem to be any pay phones (this was before the celular era).
The subway is even dicier--you can wake up with your wallet gone and your virtue in imminent danger. "Buddy," I woke up once saying, "I don't even touch myself there."
I've fallen asleep driving, which really isn't funny at all.
I fall asleep at work, in meetings, pretty much anywhere I should be awake. During one particularly prolonged stretch (about six months) of insomnia, I actually went to the movies every day for a week, because it was the only way I could get any sleep. That's some expensive shut-eye, but it was totally worth it.
But it's the dreams that are the strangest. In the minute or two snatches of sleep I get, I have very vivid dreams. You know the kind that come when you're still half awake? They're not the REM dreams, but some other kind. Anyway, I have these during whatever sleep I get at night plus whatever inadvertant and inappropriate naps I take during the day. And they are often so vivid, that I don't realize that they were dreams.
I spent all morning in the library looking for a book that had a chapter I particularly wanted to read. This chapter concerned something that I am currently working on, and I was very anxious to read it. I knew the author and the title. I knew it was the second chapter. I knew what it was about. I knew the chapter title.
The book was Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment and the chapter was "The Figure of Adam in the Hermetic Tradition."
And it wasn't there. The book was there. But it didn't have the chapter.
So I figured it must be another book by Frances Yates, and I had just mixed up the titles. So I looked in all her other books. And it wasn't there. So I thought maybe I had gotten it mixed up with another book with a similar title. I looked through every single book on the topic (50 or so). And that very special Chapter Two was just nowhere to be found.
And as I was heading over to a different library, it hit me: the chapter was in a dream. Which I should have known, because I've read The Rosicrucian Enlightenment before. And I don't remember anything about Adam in it.
But the dream was so real. I can still see the table of contents, listing this very useful chapter.
I am left with a very unsettling realization:
My dream life is as boring as my real life. In fact, it's almost indistinguishable.
Which is sort of pathetic but also sort of funny.
I've never been a very good sleeper, but I occasionally get bouts of severe insomnia. Where I can't seem to get thirty minutes of sleep in a row. Just some fitful dozing and a lot of flopping around and kicking the covers and generally making a nuisance of myself in bed. More than the usual flopping nuisance I am in bed, that is.
This is not a good condition to be in. But it occasionally has some hilarious side effects.
The most obvious of these hilarious consequences results from the narcolepsy that inevitably accompanies a long stretch of insomnia. After six weeks or so of sleepless nights, I will fall asleep on the bus or the subway. I once fell asleep and rode to the end of the line on the last bus of the day. I was stuck in a part of town I'd never been in and where there didn't seem to be any pay phones (this was before the celular era).
The subway is even dicier--you can wake up with your wallet gone and your virtue in imminent danger. "Buddy," I woke up once saying, "I don't even touch myself there."
I've fallen asleep driving, which really isn't funny at all.
I fall asleep at work, in meetings, pretty much anywhere I should be awake. During one particularly prolonged stretch (about six months) of insomnia, I actually went to the movies every day for a week, because it was the only way I could get any sleep. That's some expensive shut-eye, but it was totally worth it.
But it's the dreams that are the strangest. In the minute or two snatches of sleep I get, I have very vivid dreams. You know the kind that come when you're still half awake? They're not the REM dreams, but some other kind. Anyway, I have these during whatever sleep I get at night plus whatever inadvertant and inappropriate naps I take during the day. And they are often so vivid, that I don't realize that they were dreams.
I spent all morning in the library looking for a book that had a chapter I particularly wanted to read. This chapter concerned something that I am currently working on, and I was very anxious to read it. I knew the author and the title. I knew it was the second chapter. I knew what it was about. I knew the chapter title.
The book was Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment and the chapter was "The Figure of Adam in the Hermetic Tradition."
And it wasn't there. The book was there. But it didn't have the chapter.
So I figured it must be another book by Frances Yates, and I had just mixed up the titles. So I looked in all her other books. And it wasn't there. So I thought maybe I had gotten it mixed up with another book with a similar title. I looked through every single book on the topic (50 or so). And that very special Chapter Two was just nowhere to be found.
And as I was heading over to a different library, it hit me: the chapter was in a dream. Which I should have known, because I've read The Rosicrucian Enlightenment before. And I don't remember anything about Adam in it.
But the dream was so real. I can still see the table of contents, listing this very useful chapter.
I am left with a very unsettling realization:
My dream life is as boring as my real life. In fact, it's almost indistinguishable.
Which is sort of pathetic but also sort of funny.
posted by Feemus at
1:39 PM
6 Comments:
I can sympathize, Feemus. For most of high scool, I total about 3 hours a night. Granted, now that I'm a grad student, I often only get about 5 a night, but that's more about my schedule than how much I could sleep. But, hey, that's the life of a grad student!
By
RogueHistorian, at 9:11 PM
Sorry, that should have been "got a total of 3 hours a night".
By
RogueHistorian, at 9:12 PM
I have trouble telling the difference between a real memory and a memory of a dream also, although I'm usually able to figure it out after a while. Before heading off to the library, at any rate. :-)
It's the fact that you saw the table of contents in your dream that amazes me. Any time I've tried to read a book in a dream, it makes no sense and the words change their order on the page. You have a very precise brain!
By
jjdebenedictis, at 9:29 PM
Reading in a dream comes to me more as understanding than as actually deciphering graphical symbopls on a page and them understanding them as speech. Everytime I try to READ in a dream, I already know and understand whatever it is Im looking at and the thing, having given up its vital information is fuzzy and hard to focus on.
Have you tried Lucid Dreaming? I dont precisely know what it is but it seems like it might be something for you to explore, at least in so much as you might be able to read that chapter you were looking for and find out what it all contains.
Benticore
Out
By
Benticore, at 9:42 PM
Posts like these are why you're on my blogroll. Very funny. "Buddy, I don't even touch myself there." ROFL
Man, I have great dreams, and I swear I have deja vu at least once a day, where I can remember dreaming something I'm doing right then. Maybe it's not deja vu, but an aneurism waiting to happen.
I do most of the plotting of my novels in that in-between place, that bridge between creativity and rationality. That's my favorite place.
Besides here, of course.
By
Sherri, at 5:29 AM
yeah, I get that fuzzyreading thing, too. But lots of times I see the symbols (or at least I can see them when I wake up).
But I don't usually spend all day trying to find something in the real world to match up with the dream text!
I'm always amazed when I hear people talk about using their dreams to solve problems (or plot novels). My dreams are too random.
I had a friend/neighbor 15 years or so who was into Lucid Dreaming. I never put much stock in it, because he also slept with the windows open in the winter to make "brown fat." [???] He also though LSD was a religion. Nice guy, though. But I am willing to give it a try if I could read that damned chapter.
By
Feemus, at 5:36 PM
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