Friday, September 4, 2015

Sweet Dreams

I finished Serial. Not wholly satisfying, but not completely disappointing either. In our Law & Order world, I expect for murder mysteries to be wrapped up neatly in 43 minutes and this was definitely not the case with Serial. I could claim that I love ambiguous and untidy endings since that’s how real life is and this was real life -- that would make me sound really deep, right? But I’m not really that way. 
  • I don’t like holes in stories that go unfilled. 
  • I don’t like open-endedness. 
  • I don’t like that it appears someone has spent 15 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. 
  • I don’t like questions without answers…at least not in situations where I believe there could be answers if truth and justice hadn't maybe been sacrificed to achieve some closure...and not authentic closure, just the appearance of closure. 

I mean, if you're going to go to all the trouble of making sure things look right, why not go the extra mile to make sure they actually are right? Maybe that's harder than it sounds. Anyway, it’s a discussion for a different time and place. Not here…at least, not today. 

Day Four of my 30-day No-Sugar Challenge:

I woke up without a headache which is major progress. But I also woke up exhausted…like I hadn’t slept at all. It could be from the lack of sugar, but it could also be that the quality of my sleep wasn’t so great last night (according to my trusty Fitbit, I was very restless). Another possibility is that I’m just not getting enough sleep because my kids leave for school obscenely early (because their school day begins obscenely early) and I don’t go to bed early enough to be waking up at 5:00am. I’ve been in this routine for 4 weeks now and it may be that my body has finally worked its way into the perpetual state of grogginess that I normally experience during the school year. This is terrifying since I will be waking up a full hour earlier once morning swim practices begin for my high schooler. Maybe I should have made it one of my challenges to take a 1-hour nap per day for 30 days…but then that wouldn’t really be a challenge.

In addition to feeling tired, I’m still not clear-headed the way I had anticipated I would be despite the 72 hour mark having come and gone. But I’m not as foggy as I was so we will call that progress too. But one pretty cool thing has happened.

For the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long, I had a really vivid dream that I was able to remember and record. This is something that I used to do pretty regularly and then I would get together with a group of friends and we would work them together. Like with a big flip-chart and a Sharpie. It was something we all loved and we had some success working out things in our waking lives by examining our sleeping lives. I miss it.

But I rarely remember my dreams anymore. It’s been suggested to me that the reason I seemed to dream more when I was meeting with the dream group was that I was incentivized to remember and that I’m not really dreaming more or less now, it's just my perception. This is not an altogether unreasonable suggestion. But for most of my life I’ve been a pretty avid dreamer. 

I have the cliché ones that everyone has (it’s the last day of class in college and I haven’t been one single time…I'm naked in public…I'm running or hiding from someone or something…I'm falling and then I suddenly wake up before I hit the ground.) But I also have had some unique ones -- never lucid but very vivid. I had one of those last night and if I could wrinkle my nose like Samantha from Bewitched, I would twitch my Dream Girls here so we could work it.

The thing about our dream group was that it was safe. A close-knit group of five friends who all agreed not to share our discoveries about others outside the confines of our group. It was also a judgment-free environment. I could share a dream without fear of psychological assessment or character evaluation. And I know in my first post I said that I don’t care what people who read this blog think about me…but I’ve determined that what I really don’t care about is what other people think about the things I know about myself.  I do care what others think about the things I don’t know about myself. Which is very circular I realize…if I don’t know it, how will I know that you know it (or that you know anything at all) unless you tell me? It doesn’t matter. I believe that dreams are a window into ourselves and when I share it, something may be obvious to the person who’s listening that isn’t immediately apparent to me and that, my friends, is a state of vulnerability that I have no interest in experiencing.

That means that I will not be blogging about my dreams…except to tell you that I had one. And it was awesome.

There’s a three-day weekend coming up which means

SLEEP

I typed it in large, bold font and placed it in the center of the page because that reflects the position in which I hope it will be featured during my weekend as well. I’ll still be writing too but I’m going to have to figure out how to make it a priority when the entire family is home. This is much easier when it’s quiet and I’m alone for 6 hours during the day.


Until tomorrow…

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