Lucid.

All my life I've remembered my dreams. It's to the point where I've kept dream journals, thought hard about the people in my dreams, about the implications of them, and everything else. On the down side, my dreams often prevent me from getting the deep sleep that I need. 

Last night I dreamed about two people I know, sharing an odd house made of tunnels. The tunnels were narrow and I had trouble fitting through them on my visit. I clearly remember trying to crawl through the narrow passageways of the house on my way from the living room to the bathroom. The strange part was that the actual rooms were normal-sized--only the hallways were meant for crawling. A lesson in the difficulty of transitioning, perhaps?

Another thing about my dreams is that they aren't super trippy. I don't dream about giant anteaters chasing me through fields of squash. I don't have nightmares. Most of my dreams involve the people I know in real life in slightly peculiar circumstances. I also laugh a lot and wake myself up, because the dreams are funny. 

I was in Litchfield with a few friends not too long ago, and I unearthed one of my dream notebooks from my teenaged years that I'd been keeping at the beach house.  I laughed out loud reading the dream descriptions, and wondered why I've recalled my dreams so vividly for so long? I'm not sure of the reason. I guess part of it could be that I'm an unusually light sleeper--every single noise and movement wakes me up unless I'm in Stage 4 sleep, which is rare for me. Needless to say, I often wake up tired and cranky with a head full of odd images. 

As I write this, I'm guzzling a cup of coffee and struggling to wake up so I can begin another day at the new job. I'm also wondering if I should start another dream journal. After all, if these dreams are going to keep me awake and cheat me out of restorative rest, why not get some use out of them and record them for creative purposes? Short stories? Poems? 

Joseph's Dream, by Gaetano Gandolfi