| (no subject) |
[Apr. 6th, 2037|11:32 am] |
This journal is ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ataltane's dream journal.
This journal is part of my effort to recall my dreams. Over the last ten years or so my dream recall has fallen enormously, to the point that remembering a single dream is a very unusual situation. As well as being no fun at all, I think his has disruptive effects on my everyday life, since the completely dreamless break between days encourages me to extend the current day by going to bed later and later, with the result that give me a week during which I have no lectures or appointments, and by the end of the week I'll be nocturnal.
Not that I mind being nocturnal, but the last few hours of each "day" (cycle) tend to be lost in a sleepy haze as I try to avoid unconsciousness for a few more hours. I have slightly compulsive tendencies that make this time-wasting and soul-destroying process difficult to avoid.
In any case, my plan is to improve my dream recall, and to train myself to become lucid in dreams. It might help to control my lunatic sleeping patterns, once I understand that I can still be self-aware during sleeping hours, and it sounds like fun too. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 1st, 2004|01:12 pm] |
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Hrmph. Overslept again, 06:00-13:00. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 30th, 2004|10:00 am] |
At about 03:30 this morning, I managed to let myself fall asleep, waking up at 09:30. I don't feel wonderful, but better than I did last time I overslept. I'm not really too worried, though. I wasn't so tired at 03:30 that I had to fall asleep, but I just let myself relax on my bed too long.
I've have 13 nominated 30-minute naps since I've begun, of which 10 have worked properly. The first mistake occurred after 4 successful naps (and involved sleeping through two of them), after which I have 6 successful naps before making another mistake (after the 12th map period). Wonderfully, now is the worst I've felt in days - since the last time I overslept. Apart from the constant slight tiredness, I have felt fairly normal most of the week, even in periods where I have been only getting what would naively appear to me to be as pointless naps. |
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| </i>Failure, or Ad ardua, per astra. |
[Apr. 28th, 2004|05:43 pm] |
Here's where the (not unexpected) trouble started. I was quite tired by 03:00 and wondering how I was going to survive until 06:00, and how just 30 mins of sleep would help me anyway (the second issue didn't bother me too much, since it's implicit in the system that 30 mins is enough). By 04:00 I had decided since I hadn't completed one full day of the system yet, it wouldn't hurt to make the 6am sleep longer, say 90 mins starting from... hey, how about now? That way I could sleep now and get up at the proper time of 06:30.
Bad idea. I came to life at 09:00, whereupon I got up and thought for a while. I felt worse than I had at 04:00. The difference was that at 04:00 my brains were at the stage where they had given up on producing non-sequitur trains of thought and begun to produce things that weren't even non-sequiturs. I had caught myself just about to drop into unconsciousness a number of times. I found it very hard to stay conscious and focus on something. On the other hand, I felt quite good, in a general way. Now I felt alert, but absolutely terrible. I had no interest or enthusiam, I had no energy, mentally, even though physically I felt ok.
Whereupon, I decided to sleep until 13:00. I slept until 14:00. I though I'd go back on the system but initially give myself 90 or 120 mins of sleep every six hours, so that I was getting a normal day's sleep in 4 segments, and each segment would be long enough to support a full cycle (NREM1 -> NREM4 -> REM). Then I could gradually reduce the period to 330 mins or so. But now that 18:00 draws nigh, I don't think I can sleep for very long, and I think I'll just go back and try the system again.
In retrospect, it was probably an awful idea to begin my cycle of 30 minute sleeps after having been awake for 21 hours, since the principle of the adaptation process is that your 30 minute naps give increasingly more succour as you adjust to the schedule: and giving them an unneccesary burnen of 21 hours of wakefulness at the beginning, where they don't help much, is just silly.
I forgot to mention before that, when you have gained some competence at the system, you can fall asleep for exactly 30 minutes at will (at least at the appropriate times), and all your sleep in uninterrupted REM. That gives 2 hours of REM a day, which is acheivable in normal sleeping patterns, but is not typical (certainly not typical of my sleep, I think). And yes, the long term effects of having no NREM sleep are unknown. I plan on just trying it for a while.
Right, it's nearly six. Time to snooze. |
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| The light side of sleep deprivation |
[Apr. 28th, 2004|05:39 pm] |
I got up at about 09:00 on Morning, and went to my scheduled exam from 14:00-17:00. I next slept at 06:00 on Tuesday morning, for 30 mins (nominal: about 20 mins actual light sleep). Felt awful on awakening, but within 20 minutes I felt quite normal. Slept for 30 mins again at noon. Was rather fuzzy by the time 18:00 approached, but the short sleep really helped. Midnight was ok too.
I was feeling pretty good about this (although I new that the hardest part was coming up soon). I was tired, but golly gosh, the number of hours there have been, uninterruped by the usual gaping chasm of 9 or 10 hours of unconsciousness, since Monday morning is enough to make a sleep-deprived zombie raise his right elbow about 2 inches and wiggle it a bit in an expression of uncontrollable joie de vivre. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 28th, 2004|04:45 pm] |
Right. I'm currently experimenting with polyphasic sleep. The idea behind this is that (when you achieve some competence), you sleep for only two or three hours in each twenty four hour cycle. This is done in a number of short intervals. For instance, I've decided on a halfhour sleep every six hours.
Why isn't this crazy? I don't know that it's not crazy, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it doesn't result in tiredness, and in fact it often seems to give people an energy boost. Why would I credit this evidence enough to try it out myself? Because in my own experience, oversleeping results in weariness. Also, it involves adhering to a very rigid schedule, something I would love to achieve even in my ordinary 8-hour sleep cycle.
The problem with the system is that it's difficult to adapt to. I've heard that the second and third days, particularly, can be hell. I've also read that the absolute no that must never be broken is: never ever sleep too much. Apparently, once someone has accommodated to this system, they can switch between polyphasic and normal sleep patterns with relative ease. This would explain how some practioneers of the system got away with taking almost a day of sleep every few weeks. Details of my experiment coming soon. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 27th, 2004|01:15 pm] |
Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles
Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.
I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste
Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;
And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,
I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye.
Thanne gan I meten a merveillous swevene --
That I was in a wildernesse, wiste I nevere where.
Ac as I biheeld into the eest an heigh to the sonne,
I seigh a tour on a toft trieliche ymaked,
A deep dale bynethe, a dongeon therinne,
With depe diches and derke and dredfulle of sighte. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 27th, 2004|01:07 pm] |
No posts recently, since I've been having exams, and this interferes significantly with the amount of free time I have available for writing up dreams, not to mention with my sleeping patterns.
I have three weeks before my next exam, and rather than immediately going back onto my former dream-journalling program, I've decided to take a week or so to play with my sleeping patterns. It's always hard to tell with such projects whether my interest will last more than a day or two, so this might develop into a fuller description later on, or I might just drop it quietly and go back to cataloguing dreams. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 18th, 2004|09:30 am] |
First of all, at night, in a dimly lit room. A friend and I are chatting and drinking. The friend is someone I know of from a mailing list, but possible his personality is a bit exaggerated to be more boisterous. I have a feeling I've met him in dream form before. After a while, I'm on my own - the details are unclear. There might have been some confusing incident that caused him to leave.
Still in the dimly lit room, but it has changed a bit. I think there's someone sleeping in the next room, which there's now a door to (as if I was in some kind of antechamber, in fact), but I don't know who she is. She seems unreal, like a cartoon character. My father isn't present, but he's on my mind for some reason.
Later, but the same dream: I'm a solider, in a war. I'm in an enemy-controlled region. It has a feeling of a trench war, and I'm in the enemy's trench, but actually it's a kind of concrete installation, half buried, and I'm hiding right in front of it, behind some ledge. A different friend (this time closely modeled on a real-life friend, and very like him) is there, but he's on the enemy's side. He comes up to me and secretly tells me that he feels guilty leaving me here, but that he won' harm me. He gives me something useful. I'm not involved in any fighting, just trying to not be killed. I'm unarmed, and possibly not even in uniform (I don't think my dream self seems to be aware of the Geneva convention rules on wearing a uniform :) ) It occurs to me that I can surrender if I'm challenged, and not killed immediately. This all seems like a familiar situation, as if I've dreamed it before
A while later, I've move a bit around the circumference of the installation, hiding at the top of some low steps at the side of the building. The installation is built into a ridge, so I'm still at ground-level, the higher one. There are some narrow escapes from passing enemies, from who I hide, but none of the acually ascend the few steps. Finally, I realise that someone is coming up the steps (as if there were a mirror or something - the steps curve slightly). I keep on thinking "raise your hands! say you surrender", but I am paralysed with fear (almost certainly, I'm actually paralysed by sleep-paralysis, and waking up). A soldier with an assault rifle appears. I see his face perfectly. He's a normal looking guy, and his face is frozen with grim numbness. My hands still aren't up. I see a spark from the muzzle and hear a shot being fired, and then the sound of the round hitting the wall behind me.
Slowly, slowly, as if they're incredibly weighed down, my hands come up. He lowers the gun. My voice starts working again, but before I can do anything else, I wake up.
Awareness and Lucidity: Normal dream, but I may have become lucid near the end, while I was trying to surrender. The two feelings of familiarity suggest either that I can half-remember past dreams (or past recurring dreams), or else they suggest some awareness that I'm dreaming, and some awareness that I'm "remembering" my dreams (just like two nights ago, I possibly dreamed "remembering" a number of dreams)
Method and Notes: Fell asleep around 04:00. Set alarm for 07:00, woke up about 10 minutes earlier, quite awake and able to get up. It seems like I'm learning something. Ate some chocolate, read some dream diaries, went to sleep after about 45 minutes. Allowed myself two more hours sleep. I fell asleep in about 15 minutes, and woke up from the dream at about 09:30, which suggest that I completed a cycle in the textbook 90 minutes. I didn't feel too tired, although I'd only had five and a half hours of sleep. I decided to sleep until after 10:00 anyway, but the next time I woke up, I was incredibly tired, and ended up sleeping until noon :( [which mightn't matter if I didn't have an exam tomorrow...]. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 17th, 2004|12:23 pm] |
Failure! No dreams recalled! At on point I seemed to remember a number of dreams, but this didn't last until consciousness. Maybe I just dreamed that I remembered them...
Method: Fell asleep around 03:00. Set alarm for 07:00, but woke up at 10:00. Ate some chocolate, went to sleep a few minutes later. At this stage I should have just stayed up, as I'd already broken my routine by waking up for a break so late. Boo. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 16th, 2004|10:30 am] |
I was in a house which I identified as my grandmother's, in the main bedroom. Only my aunt and uncle live there now, but none of the real residents of the house appeared in the dream anyway. There may have been some prelude before I entered the house, perhaps on a dream-version of the street outside.
I was staying in the house for several days, and I had a little schedule (which appeared at least once later in the dream, but may or may not have been present this early. In any case, the only entry I remember was for the first day, during which I had scheduled myself to "visit bathroom" (note: this was not necessary in real life :) ). Indeed the first "day" was spend just lying on the bed, reading, I think. Intermediate "days" are not so clear.
At some point later I am sleeping in the bed. There are two others in the bed too: It's a double bed against a wall, and I'm on the outside, a woman next to me, and a man on the inside, against the wall. We're all strangers, I think, but possible the other two know each other. We're all fully clothed, and despite it being a bed, the feeling is really of three people sleeping on seats (say, on a plane). There's something about... a book? possibly. It belongs to them, and might be hidden under a pillow. Unclear. Eventually, the others get up (somehow without disturbing me - I suspect the scene rearranged itself a bit). The details are a bit unclear, but they go down and up the stairs a few times. The man gets dressed (though he probably was already), he's complaining about something. I remark how it probably has something to do with how they're new here, but I've been visiting and staying overnight throughout my life. They can't seem to leave the house either since they don't have a key to get back in, although I do (not in real life, though). It becomes unclear.
Lucidity: Normal dream,.
Method: Fell asleep around 03:00. Set alarm for 07:00, but woke up at 09:00. Ate some chocolate, read some dream diaries, went to sleep after about 30 minutes. Decided to use a binaural beat entrainment program that some people had reported success with on a lucid dreaming forum. I was rather skeptical of the theory [it seems like pseudoscience in that it sounds somewhat reasonable, but there may not be any evidence for it - I don't know any research on the subject. Anyone know of any studies on it? A survey of opinions in posts found via google suggest that the community that uses it has a fairly low crazy quotient, and seems to be quite interested in scientific research on the subject]. There had been mixed, though often successful results, for the preset in question as a dream-recalling aid. I used it for 23 mins, which as I've just checked now means that it got to the last important stage. I got fed up listening to it, and tried to go asleep.
My alarm was set for 40 minutes ahead. At first I had difficulty sleeping, but then the next thing I recall is waking 30 minutes after my alarm (not having heard it), with the memory of the dream, and with an incredible feeling of comfortable heaviness, which I don't usually get. It's unclear whether this was due to the binaural signal or not.
Notes: The feeling of heaviness is still present, 30 minutes after waking up, but lessened. Also, once again, I thought I had remembered no dreams until I had fully awakened. I seem to be taking the suggestion "when I wake up, I will remember my dreams" rather too literally. Perhaps I should aim not to forget them instead. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 15th, 2004|12:00 pm] |
My mother and I are watching TV, but apart from some comments at the start, we don't feature in the dream, and most of it involves watching dream characters. The scenes change as if by switching camera. The sequence begins by an image of a man's head entering from the left of the screen and (possibly) kissing another man on the forehead, in greeting. The second man is irrelevant and never appears again. The first man is wearing an green army jacket, with a hood, but the German flag is on the back of the hood (which is hanging behind his head). He has a fairly roundish head, he is partly bald, and his remaining hair is light and fluffy, as if it had been shaved a few months ago. This is visible during the moment when he kisses, as the film freezes temporarily while a caption saying something like "People know to trust companies" appears. My mother laughs and comments that that's not true. Neither of us reoccur in the dream.
The scene unfreezes, the first man goes to a cupboard and open it. It's filled with hundreds of eggs in egg-cartons. He takes one and puts it in his inside pocket, naturally, but possibly a bit furtively. In the next scene he's walking across the floor of the building, which looks like a factory floor, but during the dream I seemed to think of it as more of a warehouse. There's something wrong with the way the man walks - it has the effect of a failure by the dream to show natural movement. He walks with a side-to-side swaying motion, and his head rolls rather disturbingly side to side too. He doesn't look like he did in the first scene. He no longer wears the army jacket, and he has short wiry sandy hair. His face is different too.
In the next scene he approaches the exit of the factory. There are three or four people waiting for him at the door, at least one of whom is wearing a while lab coat (which the man himself may be wearing now, too). The man is confronted over stealing. For his response, the "cameras" move to a close up of his face, which has changed again, now having slightly native American features, but only partially so. He's very angry and complains about never have been given a pay rise over all his years of service, and about the difficulty he has feeding his children. He takes the egg out of his pocket and throws it furiously at the ground in front of his interlocutor, before marching out.
The whole sequence seemed to fill the place of an advertisement break for some other show, which is now returned to. It looks a bit like the old Late Late Show, but it's only glimpsed for a second, and nobody is present on the set. End of dream. This was remembered, but I didn't understand that it was a dream for quite a while, probably due to the lack of my presence for most of it.
Lucidity: Normal dream, but almost all in the third person. Not understood as a dream until later.
Method: Fell asleep around 03:00. Set alarm for 07:00, woke up about 45 minutes later. Ate some chocolate, read some dream diaries, went to sleep after about 15 minutes. No dream came for a long while. Overslept in order to find one. Finally had this dream at about 12:00, in the 9th hour.
Notes: Although I had a lot of difficulty remembering a dream, this is the first time in maybe five years I've remembered dreams on consecutive nights. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 14th, 2004|10:30 am] |
Working in offices of company, details forgotten. I visit the offices of another company or group of the same type. Entry is via some sort of long ramp with a barrel sliding on a rope (remembered from later in the dream, but may have been different on the way up). I somehow get to the top, and talk to the manager, who's a tall woman with a ponytail and wearing fishnet tights (not, however, attractive...). I ask which company is best for ... (giving references?). She seems to know me, and gives me a possibly sarcastic answer.
On the way out, I can't figure out how to descend. I don't really want to go back to the woman to ask her. I get in the barrel or box, and the impulse of my entry sets it off down the rope. I think that that was bound to happen and there was no other way, so there's probably no problem.
It gather speed and I presume it's going to crash into the end-stop. I brace myself, and although I don't recall the impact, I find out that tens(?) or hundreds(?) of passengers (?!) were hurt(!). I wake up, I think because of a phone call.
Lucidity: Normal dream
Method: Fell asleep around 02:30. Set alarm for 07:00, woke up about 45 minutes later. Ate some chocolate, read some dream diaries, went to sleep after about 15 minutes. I think the dream came very soon after.
Notes: This is the first dream I've fully remembered in months. It's only rarely that I'm aware of having dreamt at all, even on awakening</i> |
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