I slide in and out of sleep easily. I have sat in seminars when very short of sleep, slipping in and out of dreams. I used to puzzle over the earlier scientific statements that dreams come in REM sleep, which takes hours to achieve. I wanted to call up sleep researchers and ask them how I slipped in and out of dreams so easily. If I am tired enough I do not even need to close my eyes.
My dreams are full color and all five senses are fully engaged. I have spent some time in some dreams trying to determine if I was dreaming. In one dream a cat’s tail had fallen off and was lying on the floor wiggling like a lizard’s tail. I was appalled. I worried about how to reattach it. I thought it must be a dream. This kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life. I sat on top of my made bed with my cat and her tail, trying to come up with a way to figure out if it was a dream, or whether I should call the veterinarian. Eventually I forced my eyes open in bed and sighed with relief that it was indeed a dream.
Sometimes my mind starts manufacturing the imagery before I am entirely asleep.
That was the case last night. It was very late. I was comfortably curled in bed. My mind generated a city as seen from a commuter train perhaps. Buildings passed in the light of early evening. I looked at them as they passed, still awake, marveling at my brain’s ingenuity. I tried to get the passage to slow, so I could see more detail, wondering how precise and complete my mind was making them. The image generating part of my brain would not comply. I caught the details of old brick here, a sinuous curve to the alignment of vertical windows from floor to floor there, the aged wood and paint of a tenement window frame farther on. Twenty story buildings rose from a background of three to five story buildings. The outlines were clear. I was looking at the backs not the fronts. The buildings were primarily brick, in various hues and ages. Some were wood and not holding up so well with age.
It was not yet a dream, there was no plot, no people, no odd dream changes. I simply watched in some amazement as the buildings passed by.
Eventually I slid fully into sleep. I do not know what I dreamed of.
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5 comments:
I find myself reading this with a scientific curiosity. Is this in fact "dreaming?" If so, is it in fact "REM sleep" or can one have dreams while not in REM sleep? How common is this (assuming you're not the only human on the planet who has this dreaming ability)?
REM sleep and dreaming appear to be two separate things. http://www.apsa.org/pubinfo/remqa.htm
It's always interesting when you find out that something "everyone knows" isn't right.
What links do you have on the rumors that the earth is *not* the center of the universe?
Foolishness.
RIAN is the center of the Universe.
Ah! Rian would blush, would Rian, if Rian had brackets.
...and a smaller ego.
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