What Do We Know About Sleep and Dreams
“Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.”
— Thomas Dekker
What Led Me to Explore Sleep and Dreams and How You Benefit I have a love/hate relationship with sleep. Why love? Because it feels great, wonderful dreams happen, I feel lighter, can move faster, gravity is easier to deal with, and anything can happen. Why do I hate the sleep process? I struggled to find my sweet spot of sleep. It hurts to wake up, I dread nightmares, I sometimes get sleep paralysis, and adjusting to waking up is difficult because it is slower, heavier, denser, more restricted, and harder to control.
I have probably slept more than most people you or I know. In fact, it took a while to rouse me after my birth, enough for my mother to tell me the stories of how much the doctors tried to wake me up and ensure I was breathing. It wasn’t that I couldn’t breathe; it was that being birthed was interrupting my nine-month slumber where I was perfectly comfortable.
This may not be so unusual since infants sleep most of the time. But my mother said that it was all I did all the time. I never cried for food or for any other reason, and she had to struggle to wake me and keep me up enough to eat or do anything. Growing up, I remember being sleepy a lot of the time. But as I grew older going to school and doing chores it got worse. But it was necessary to work and work a lot. I worked myself raw because that is what I thought was the path to life success. I didn’t realize it then that sleep deprivation was causing long-term damage
In general, the dreams I had while sleeping were ordinary growing up. They mainly were jumbled up with all kinds of imagery. Nothing that caused me to think or talk about it too much. But I recall our family did discuss dreams with general interest, “Hey, I dreamt I had lots of toys and…” kind of discussions. Things changed drastically for me in 2001.
I was recovering from the sudden loss of my mother to cancer and other losses, including my health. What was my dark night of the soul and spiritual awakening is discussed in my previous books. During that time, I lost a sense of who I was and why I was here. I was so lost I had to get into a habit of writing really basic things “to do” down. I had to write down: Wash, drink, eat, move the body, sleep/nap, everything.
Due to my ill health, I could no longer live an ordinary life, and this included traditional work. The upside was that for the first time, instead of working myself sick with two to three jobs, I was forced to pause.
With this pause came exploring my sleep needs which included my sleep schedule and dreams. In addition to my regular dreams, I began to have strange, long, vivid, and extraordinary dreams. I had to write down these dreams; they were just too “real” not to record somehow. I had no idea what doors, spiritual doors that is, were opening. But as a rational human, I needed to take a step back and ask what we knew about sleep itself and, subsequently, dreams.
This is what is happening now, with the pandemic causing a global pause for many people. Their lives and schedules have been disrupted in such a way that now many are facing an awakening. The idea of a regular life, including what the correct sleep schedule should be is changing every day.
For me, this occurred back in 2003 when I no longer had an ordinary life or twenty-four-hour schedule. Though it was involuntary due to illness, I was able to sleep almost as much as I wanted. For the first time, I could figure out how many hours I needed to sleep to feel rested and refreshed. I never had in my life felt refreshed after sleeping. And so began, unbeknownst to me, the great sleep, dream experiment of my life.
It was extremely difficult, and much was happening to my body, mind, and spirit due to injuries. Still, I would go to sleep and allow myself to wake up on my own and discovered that I need twelve, sixteen, and sometimes up to twenty-four hours of sleep to feel somewhat functional. After about three hours of waking up, I would become irresistibly exhausted again and desperately needed a nap.
This is known as excessive sleepiness or idiopathic sleepiness, discussed in detail later under “disorders.” Additionally, I would be up most nights and could not fall asleep until the sun began to rise. I believed I was nocturnal. A nocturnal sleep cycle is when the person is awake most of the night and sleeps most of the day. Their sleep/wake cycle is reversed.
Being nocturnal does not mean you are broken, abnormal, have a disease, and need to be fixed. It simply means you are wired to be awake at night and sleep during the day.
As time went by, I continued to study my sleep. I discovered that I would wake up later and later until I was temporarily a day person. Then the cycle would begin again but always sleeping twelve or more hours per sleep cycle. What a sleep disaster! I tried almost everything to stay with a regular sleep schedule, and nothing worked.
I needed to know what was going on with my sleep and what doctors, researchers, or anyone knew about this mess of a schedule. I wanted to know and learn more than the basics of sleep. This is known as Sighted Non-24[1] and is fairly new to the sleep disorder research world.
I wanted to know why I go weeks being nocturnal but then become a day person for a few days to resume my nocturnal living. I wanted to understand why, when left to my own devices (not being interrupted during sleep), I have such strange, realistic, bizarre, interesting dreams and frightening nightmares. Hint, it’s a combination of a few rare sleep conditions.[2]
Today I take the personal and professional experience to provide you sleep and restoration-centered design information, products, and services. Please see my bio for more specifics on my background.
[1] Sightednon24 https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/non-24-hour-sleep-wake-disorder/
[2] Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, Idiopathic Hypersomnia and Sighted Non-24
