Awake. Asleep. Dreaming. Choose One....
Jun. 9th, 2010 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuI've been having trouble sleeping lately. I had a cold recently, got over it...I thought, then had a relapse. Now I think I'm really over it. And I'm having trouble sleeping. I go bed...and lie there with my mind racing. Thinking about writing, and plots and characters and story ideas. Which would be great if it accomplished anything, but it doesn't, really.
I tend to go over the same ideas repeatedly, circling endlessly without getting any new insights. I've tried various techniques for calming my brain. Counting backwards from 100 with each breath--but that doesn't do it. Telling myself that "Now is the time to rest. You can worry about these things tomorrow." That doesn't help a lot either. I try to change the focus of my thoughts, but with only limited success.
So I lie in bed for a long while, look at the clock, and see that twenty minutes, forty minutes, or an hour has passed. At which point I get up, since one thing I do do consistently is try not to let that happen. I want my brain to associate the bedroom with sleep or sex--and nothing else. So I get up and read for a while, until I feel sleepy, then go back to bed. This may mean getting a short night's sleep, but what can you do?
Of late, even that hasn't worked. I come back to bed sleepy...and still end up tossing and turning (sometimes revolving like a roast on a spit--on my left side, on my stomach, on my right side, on my back, lather, rinse, repeat). It's annoying. I wonder if the fact that I was taking Nyquil every night for a few nights and now I'm not is part of the problem, but I don't know.
Part of it, too, is that I'm sure I'm actually sleeping more than I think I am. My lovely and talented wife often makes sport of me for claiming I wasn't asleep when I doze on the sofa, or take a nap. And she's right. Hard to argue that you weren't asleep when you were snoring. I drift in and out of sleep with no markers for the transition, so I often think I never slept when in fact I did.
This all reached the level of absurdity today (or this morning, whatever). I was lying sleeplessly in bed, tossing and turning. I decided to get up. So I threw the covers aside, got out of bed, and walked around the foot of the bed--very closely, it's tight quarters--and brushed someone's foot which was hanging over the foot of the bed. This disturbed said person, who pushed the covers down and raised her head to see what was going on. It was a woman who was not my lovely and talented wife.
Which is when I realized I was dreaming. I realized I was having a lucid dream, and that I was actually asleep after all. Asleep--and dreaming, it appears, that I was awake and unable to sleep. This was very strange and a little bit frustrating, but it also presented an opportunity. I have semi-lucid dreams fairly often. I won't quite reach the point of knowing it's a dream, but I'll realize I can control my environment, cause or control or prevent events, and influence the actions of other people in the dream. It's a lot of fun, but not truly a lucid dream. Those are rarer.
But in this case, I was fully lucid. I was dreaming and I knew I was dreaming. So I decided to seize the moment. I climbed back into bed with my anonymous but attractive co-star and started making out with her. It was very enjoyable, and I remember thinking repeatedly that I was impressed by the fidelity of the dream. Except that I knew it was a dream, it was incredibly realistic.
And enjoyable. Alas, just when it was getting really interesting...I woke up. Which was frustrating but unsurprising. My sex dreams always end just when they're getting really good. I'm sure that says something about my subconscious, but I don't know what.
So I woke up, and realized that I had, in fact, been dreaming even though I thought I'd been awake the first time. Which makes me wonder how often I'm sleeping for a few minutes at a time on these "sleepless" nights and just never realize it. It's a mystery.
In other news, I wrote about 2500 words on Monday and the same again today, on two separate short stories. Erotica, both. And both need to be completed. But once they're finished, I'll have two new stories to send out. Yesterday I didn't write at all, I spent a big chunk of my day doing yard work since it was a rare sunny day (as of late) and not likely to recur.
After all the endless rain, the yard desperately needed mowing, so I mowed, and had Twoson mow as well. I used the weedwacker
on the grass that was too long for the reel mower to cut it effectively, and also made serious inroads on the jungle of weeds and wild grass that had taken over the edges of the yard. I also applied Weed-b-Gon to the dandelions and other weeds that are making a serious stab at colonizing huge swaths of the lawn. We'll see how that works.
Tomorrow: more writing.
I tend to go over the same ideas repeatedly, circling endlessly without getting any new insights. I've tried various techniques for calming my brain. Counting backwards from 100 with each breath--but that doesn't do it. Telling myself that "Now is the time to rest. You can worry about these things tomorrow." That doesn't help a lot either. I try to change the focus of my thoughts, but with only limited success.
So I lie in bed for a long while, look at the clock, and see that twenty minutes, forty minutes, or an hour has passed. At which point I get up, since one thing I do do consistently is try not to let that happen. I want my brain to associate the bedroom with sleep or sex--and nothing else. So I get up and read for a while, until I feel sleepy, then go back to bed. This may mean getting a short night's sleep, but what can you do?
Of late, even that hasn't worked. I come back to bed sleepy...and still end up tossing and turning (sometimes revolving like a roast on a spit--on my left side, on my stomach, on my right side, on my back, lather, rinse, repeat). It's annoying. I wonder if the fact that I was taking Nyquil every night for a few nights and now I'm not is part of the problem, but I don't know.
Part of it, too, is that I'm sure I'm actually sleeping more than I think I am. My lovely and talented wife often makes sport of me for claiming I wasn't asleep when I doze on the sofa, or take a nap. And she's right. Hard to argue that you weren't asleep when you were snoring. I drift in and out of sleep with no markers for the transition, so I often think I never slept when in fact I did.
This all reached the level of absurdity today (or this morning, whatever). I was lying sleeplessly in bed, tossing and turning. I decided to get up. So I threw the covers aside, got out of bed, and walked around the foot of the bed--very closely, it's tight quarters--and brushed someone's foot which was hanging over the foot of the bed. This disturbed said person, who pushed the covers down and raised her head to see what was going on. It was a woman who was not my lovely and talented wife.
Which is when I realized I was dreaming. I realized I was having a lucid dream, and that I was actually asleep after all. Asleep--and dreaming, it appears, that I was awake and unable to sleep. This was very strange and a little bit frustrating, but it also presented an opportunity. I have semi-lucid dreams fairly often. I won't quite reach the point of knowing it's a dream, but I'll realize I can control my environment, cause or control or prevent events, and influence the actions of other people in the dream. It's a lot of fun, but not truly a lucid dream. Those are rarer.
But in this case, I was fully lucid. I was dreaming and I knew I was dreaming. So I decided to seize the moment. I climbed back into bed with my anonymous but attractive co-star and started making out with her. It was very enjoyable, and I remember thinking repeatedly that I was impressed by the fidelity of the dream. Except that I knew it was a dream, it was incredibly realistic.
And enjoyable. Alas, just when it was getting really interesting...I woke up. Which was frustrating but unsurprising. My sex dreams always end just when they're getting really good. I'm sure that says something about my subconscious, but I don't know what.
So I woke up, and realized that I had, in fact, been dreaming even though I thought I'd been awake the first time. Which makes me wonder how often I'm sleeping for a few minutes at a time on these "sleepless" nights and just never realize it. It's a mystery.
In other news, I wrote about 2500 words on Monday and the same again today, on two separate short stories. Erotica, both. And both need to be completed. But once they're finished, I'll have two new stories to send out. Yesterday I didn't write at all, I spent a big chunk of my day doing yard work since it was a rare sunny day (as of late) and not likely to recur.
After all the endless rain, the yard desperately needed mowing, so I mowed, and had Twoson mow as well. I used the weedwacker
on the grass that was too long for the reel mower to cut it effectively, and also made serious inroads on the jungle of weeds and wild grass that had taken over the edges of the yard. I also applied Weed-b-Gon to the dandelions and other weeds that are making a serious stab at colonizing huge swaths of the lawn. We'll see how that works.
Tomorrow: more writing.