What a Day for a Daydream

"Two dreams came down to earth one night, From the realm of mist and dew;

One was a dream of the old, old days, And one was a dream of the new." Eugene Field

I have a deep envy of anyone who can sleep through the night and wake up well rested. I'm sure that at one point in my life, I must have been able to do that. Now my nights are broken up into little fractions of sleep coming 2 to 3 hours at a time. It is not that I feel bad, I just wake up and can't go back to sleep. Feeling bad doesn't come until about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, when I'm exhausted.

My little fractions of sleep however, are full of highly emotional dreams. These dreams come into what I have categorized as either action packed drama or mystical hysterias. The mystical hysterias are mostly comedic in nature and generally consist of entirely unexplainable strange encounters with my Dad. My Dad always cracked me up when he was alive and now, years since he has passed, he continues to do so in my dreams. The action packed dramas almost always contain some notorious villain who is intent on killing me for unknown reasons, which I have never been able to ascertain. Some of these are quite frightening and yet at times there is somehow, some humor injected along the way. While pinned down behind a log by devastating fire from an automatic weapon during one particularly nasty dream sequence, I received a tap on the shoulder and turned around to see Quick Draw McGraw telling me not to worry. When he stood up and said "Now you just wait a gol' durn minute" and took a bullet through the top of his hat, I nearly died laughing in my sleep." I'd sure like to see some psychoanalyst explain that one.

It amazes me how realistic my dreams can feel at times. I can wake up sometimes and swear that I had just spent the evening talking with Dad. I have noticed that Dad and I are usually much younger in my dreams. I guess it should be intuitive that one doesn't want to or need to dream about oneself when they are old and fat when one can just as easily dream about oneself when they are young and thin.

I often become so disappointed when I wake up so darn early during a dream that I yearn to fall back asleep quickly, like I have a chance of reentering that dream at the precise location where it was interrupted. It never works though and I just lay there wide awake. Now don't get me wrong, I can get up and read for awhile or go get on the computer a bit and then go back to bed in an hour or so and get another fraction of sleep later, but I just can't doze right back off to sleep.

Freud argued that wish fulfillment was the motivation for the content of all dreams. He coined the term "day residue", which according to him were thoughts and memories of the day just gone by that lingered in the mind and instigated the dreams of the night. Well Freud, I've never been pursued by someone toting automatic weapons during the day (at least to my knowledge) and I've never met Quick Draw McGraw in person.

One of the major problems with my bits and pieces of sleep is the fact that I tend to get really sleepy around one o'clock in the afternoon. Now on a weekend this doesn't pose too much of a problem, but my intense snoring during the weekdays has a tendency to keep my co-workers awake and most of these people are just unbearable while in a conscious state.

I remember reading or seeing on TV about dolphins sleeping while they swam in circles. You see, dolphins have to be conscious to breathe so they just can't go to sleep. Somehow they have solved that problem by letting one half of their brain sleep at a time. I've been thinking that maybe I need to learn how to do that in order for me to sleep and work throughout the day. Half of my brain is about all that functions anyway, so I'm fairly sure no one would even notice.

We have within our bodies, millions and millions of molecules called ATP (adenosine triphosphate) which provides the necessary energy with which we function. During the day as we expend energy, a byproduct of ATP, adenosine, builds up and plays a major role in making us sleepy (without going any further into microbiology just take my word for it).

In my case, I also have aden o'grandson build up, which tends to make me even sleepier. In recent testing, I have found that high levels of adenosine combined with ultra high levels of aden o'grandson causes drowsiness beyond any human capability of measurement. In my soon to be published work on sleep deprivation amongst old timers, you will find that this high level of drowsiness causes the elderly human body to sleep at an accelerated rate, consequently making you wake up sooner. Whilst the normal human being is undergoing REM (Rapid Eye Movement), people like Ol' Simmons are undergoing WSREM (Warp Speed Rapid Eye Movement). Hence my fractioned sleeping patterns.

"To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub..." Bill Shakespeare