Catching some zzzzzz

I’m a dreamer.  No, I don’t mean I loll around in a hammock and stare into the heavens and think deep thoughts.  I’m talking about actual dreaming, the thing that happens during sleep.  My dreams are often very long and complicated with digressions and sometimes scenarios that I would not have thought of while awake.  Sometimes I think I’m just a character in someone else’s dreams because there seems to be a disconnect with my own life experiences and the plotlines of my dreams.

I am usually alone in my dreams but sometimes I encounter practically everybody I’ve ever known, but mostly I deal with strangers of all stripes and ethnicities and everybody speaks in nice, unaccented English.  I do have body-stiffening nightmares sometimes (not often) that make me bolt awake like a character in a bad television movie, but mostly my dreams are benign and I get to do a lot of travel to exotic places and experience some pretty nifty things that have no basis in the facts of my actual existence.  I often get lost while wandering in my dreams but it never seems to worry me as long as I’m not cold or hungry (a bodily state, of course, shared with my actual, but sleeping, being).

 
I am sometimes a fabulous athlete, mainly basketball and competitive swimming or diving, but I also ski in graceful swoops and am purposefully airborne quite a bit with billows of sparkling snow cascading around my back-lit torso.

I also often find myself being able to breathe underwater and swoop around the ocean floor like a merman on Ecstasy.  In my dreams I am not fat and look great in a Speedo.

As I said, I travel a lot in my dreams and a huge bonus is that I get to see a lot of art; and it can be totally immersive.  Not just museum art in frames and on pedestals, but entire rooms and buildings and various vast outdoor scapes and scarps.  The art is usually breathtakingly beautiful and it is often high-color intense and indescribably intricate.  I have no idea where these visions come from but I like to think I share this dream-trait with some of the mighty of the art world who were (and are) able to get it down on canvas, or whatever, when they return to what passes for real life.  I sure can’t do it, even if I could remember the details.  And there’s the rub.  Unless I really concentrate, upon awakening the visions disappear, forgotten somewhere in my frontal lobe.

Oh, yeah, one more thing:  My dreams are filled with light.  I’m not sure how that happens since there is usually zero light in my bedroom and my eyes are shut tightly.  My REM sleep must be very active and my eyeballs probably ricochet around in their sockets like pinballs.  Sometimes I’m so busy in my dreams that I wake up exhausted.  But it’s usually worth it and I can catch up with a nap in the afternoon on the couch, perhaps to dream again.