What are you dreaming....

[King Rat]

My wife says I'm not normal.

Every night I dream - quite often they are like motion pictures. They have plots and characters and beginnings and endings. Many of them are quite good and, of course, I'm always the star (but not always the good guy). Lately they have become so realistic that I can remember certains sounds so clearly. Some of them are very weird.

I wake up in the mornings and start telling my wife about them and she just goes, "how in the world do you remember all that stuff?"

But it has a price.

After a night of heavy dreaming (which is probably 9 out of 10) I wake up mentally exhausted. More tired than when I went to bed. Sometimes I am just drained all day long. It can be a vicious cycle.

Every now and then I wake up and can't remember dreaming and I feel so refreshed that I can hardly wait to get up and face the day. It makes me wish sometimes I had a little switch where I could turn the dreams off and get some rest.

When I was 5 years old I decided I wanted to be a writer (and a crop duster pilot). My mom nixed the airplane thing and my father nixed the writer part. Nobody worth a damn wrote books.

So I wasted much of my adulthood thinking writing was a silly dream. Some years ago I started a novel and it was really bad so I scraped it and started another. On and on never finishing anything but getting better at it. Now I am working on one that I think I could sell and for the last few weeks I've been spending every spare minute working on it. And during that time the dreams have increased ten-fold. I've got so many book ideas bouncing around in my head right now that my fingers get tired just thinking about them.

I sure can ramble on. My wife says I'm not normal.

What kind of dreams do you have?

[granny2young]

Then I must not be normal either witt. I have some strange dreams, almost nightly. (I blame it on Prozac lol) but technically, I have had them for years. I never put together that the dreams is what caused me to be so tired and not rested, but you make a lot of sense. I wander if there is anything that can be done to turn it off so one could rest? They have a pill for about everything else

Seriously, I start dreaming before I am asleep. That is the only way I can fall asleep, most of the time taking hours, but I am usually in a dream before I go to sleep.

[King Rat]

I've never figured out how to stop thinking about something. In school it kept me from paying attention in class. I would try my best to pay attention but next thing I knew I would be out driving a race car or fighting bad guys. If the teacher called on me I would be lost as a goose. The only thing that saved me was that I was really good at reading the textbooks and figuring things out for myself so I made good grades.

Even today I have trouble listening to someone tell me what they want me to do. If I am in a meeting planning some project I do fine if I am talking but when it comes my turn to listening I wander off. I don't mean to do it - I haven't found a way to NOT do it. So I jot notes and read them after the meetings to figure out what I'm supposed to do. Luckily I've always been able to take pretty accurate notes while I'm off in la-la land.

I've asked my wife what she thinks about when she goes to bed and she says "nothing". She just goes to sleep. I can't do that. Like you, Granny, I start "dreaming" (I've often said I do my best daydreaming at night) as the only way to get to sleep. But once I get to sleep my dreams NEVER have anything to do with what I was thinking about while going to sleep.

I've also found that if I go very long without writing something (a poem or working on my novel, or a song) I start getting really restless - feeling like I'm supposed to be accomplishing something.

When I was a kid, before I started school, I started making up little jingles and poems and songs. I remember wishing I knew how to write so I could write them down. Back then I had no doubt that I would become a writer of something. The stuff just popped into my head. I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. But the reality of my father killed that for many years. Every time I get close to finishing something I start hearing him telling me I'm not good enough and scrap it (to keep from getting the rejection letters if I actually sent something to a publisher, I guess).

I have noticed one common thing about my dreams. No matter where I am in my dream if something bad happens to me I am suddenly back in the house where I grew up and my father is suddenly the villian. Almost every time. Now I'd just bet a shrink would have a field day with me but so far I haven't wanted to have my imagination "cured".

But back to the idea of a dream making you tired in the morning. I am absolutely convinced of it. My level of tired when I wake up is usually proportional to the amount of activity in my dream.

I guess that's one reason I get so addicted to these forums - I am addicted to writing SOMETHING.

[granny2young]

you just may be on to something Rat. You certainly put things into a new perspective for me. My daughter loves to interpret dreams and "analyze" things. I am going to call her and ask her opinion. I thought I was alone in this world because I daydreamed at night to go to sleep, lol.

[King Rat]

I clearly remember lying in my bed at night when I was in my early teens daydreaming about driving a car through all sorts of Burt Reynolds stunts, trying to get to sleep. Of course there was always some reason I "had" to be driving that fast.

Some people count sheep, I guess.

[TF Admin]

Does everyone have the same dream where they are flying and then suddenly...not. Your whole body jerks awake in bed like you just landed there? Or am I the only one?

TFADMIN

[King Rat]

Sometimes I fly in my dreams but more often I find myself having to go a long distance without a vehicle so I run. I don't run very fast but my strides are like football fields and I go really high in the air - almost like floating. It's pretty fun.

The only time I can recall ever hitting the ground was when I was a kid. I had always heard that if you dream you are falling and hit the ground you would die of a heart attack (I think my brother may have made that up to scare me). Lots of times I would dream I was falling but always woke up before hitting the ground. But one time I dreamed I was riding in a convertible and it hit a bump and I went waaaay up in the air then came down and hit the ground. Even bounced a few times. And I'm still here.

But I can still see that dream as clearly as if it were yesterday.

[missfairy]

When I dream of flying, it's more like I'm doing a swim-stroke in the air. Odd, I know. But yes, sometimes I do wake up abruptly because of landing/crashing.

[rockinrickus]

Just be thankful you can sleep, and those Dreams don't Haunt YOU..............................