Mid terms

I never wake up before 9:30 in the morning <_<

(but that's because I have a sleeping problem = hypersomnia ^^)

I have the opposite issue. Insomnia. xDD

If it's not completely dark, and I haven't been trying to sleep for at least two hours, or have taken something to make me sleepy, I don't fall asleep or stay asleep. D;

Sio wrote:

I have the opposite issue. Insomnia. xDD

If it's not completely dark, and I haven't been trying to sleep for at least two hours, or have taken something to make me sleepy, I don't fall asleep or stay asleep. D;

Me, too. And once I'm awake again ... until someone drugs me badly or I fall unconscious (which hasn't happened so far, thank God) or night falls once more, I can kiss sleep goodbye.
(That so does suck when I have nightmares ... coupled with the fact I love horror movies/games, I'm a sleepless person. Good thing glasses mask the shadows unter my eyes. )

However I've found that music helps somewhat ... which just might be useless to you, Sio, because I've fallen asleep to music (almost) all my life. Nevertheless, maybe it's worth you give it a try?

Thank you for the suggestion. c:

I've tried music, and for the most part, it'll work. But only if it's mostly instrumental, there's little to no percussion, it stays under a certain volume setting, and there are no favorite lyrics of mine to stay up singing along with. xD

Usually, I'll just cut out all the light I can, cover myself head to toe in blankets, and then wait to sleep. Which works if I'm already tired. <:

Nightmares suck. D;
But I can sleep through them anyway. Which is both good and bad. xDD

When I was a tiny tike, there was a, "don't drink and drive-type" service announcement which involved a liitle car with highschool kids riding in it, laughing it up, and getting drunk. One of the jocks had a letterman's jacket on. The spot would cut back and forth between liveliness and silence; the silence suddenly having four skeletons where the teenagers had been, one of them wearing a letterman's jacket. The cold blue lighting, the cobwebs, the big black empty sockets, the wide open mandibles, and the life implied in the sound slamming against the static, silent bones really scared the shit out of me. I was maybe seven years old.

My innocence made me resilient. Every sunrise held the promise of brand new day, one without me getting picked on at school. But, sadly, every day but, one was always the same until the end of elementary school. Someone who had it worse always had to push me to the ground and/or punch me. It wasn't always the same person. I was the hobbling little, happy-go-lucky, class clown. I was an easy target.

Between school recesses during the day and my dad telling me and my little brother at night, "Alright, the devil's going to visit you tonight if you don't go to bed [like you were told], by the age of eight, my nerves were shot. Heh-heh-heh. While laying in bed, I couldn't even look at the holes in the wall where a curtain rod had been because the black dots on crumbled spackle, ensconced in frayed drywall reminded me of a skull some how. Hell, even the barely visible, deep, nighttime shadows under the folds in clothes in my dirty clothes hamper reminded me of scary faces.

The freight train from out of the darkness, barreled down track at break-neck speed. It's wheels screamed as it went as if breaking but, not slowing down one bit. The horn was blaring relentlessly in that oh-so-familiar, "long-long-short-long" pattern. The little lights on top sent blue beams fixed in every direction except forward. Skeletons with glowing yellow-white sockets clinged like fools and phantoms on all sides of the train, some skulking on top like lions with their mouths shut, others hanging on the sides with arms and legs outstretched laughing silently at the top of their non-existent lungs. They all stared at me.

We lived less than one quarter mile from the tracks back in 1989.

------

Although much more infrequently, I was still getting picked on in junior high. This time it was more fists, basketballs and footballs meeting my head than my palms and knees meeting the ground.

I was twelve and had two choices I thought, "Either go find a crevice and cry every five minutes or I can get angry." I chose the latter and the best friend, and the heavy metal sensibility that went with it. Watching a daytime talkshow, I saw a technique espoused by some pyschologist consisting of a, "willing mental image switch" of sorts. A woman in her forties with chronic nightmares said she used the technique to great effect and that it only got easier and infinitely more automatic as time went on resulting in the nullification of any and all subsequent nightmares.

The psychologist said something to the effect of, "...our dreams are constructs of our own thoughts. We always have ownership of them no matter the feeling and as such we feel the anticipation of the bad event in the nightmare because we've subconsciously made our minds up already as to the outcome. So switch it, cut to a different scene in an instant. Consciously tell yourself, "birds" while wholeheartedly wanting and expecting relief and you'll see your flock of peaceful birds effectively killing your nightmare."

The lady said it worked for her, I made a conscious effort and tried it and it worked for me. And for the past 18 years, I've owned the shit out of my dreams! I love it!

I can fall asleep to the television but, I cannot fall asleep to music.

I have a type of lucid nightmare. If I am able, I can steer my own actions and logic in a dream well enough to survive. Sometimes the nightmares take such unexpected turns, they cease carrying that same kind of danger they started with.

For instance, there was this inexplicable dream where I was walking along a path, though it was more of a sidewalk falling into disrepair before turning into a dirt road, rather than a typical path. There was a man standing at a fork in the road, further away, naked and with an axe in his hands. People before me on the walk would keep going, and as they got to the fork in the road, he killed them. He cut them, and brained them, and bashed them brutally and he let himself get rained on with blood, laughing so hard his eyes bulged and the veins in his neck popped out. Every time, like sheep they pressed forward, they kept walking into it. Some of them even saw it, thought to back up, and then still walked into it. I was about 10 yards away from him, and as he pulled the axe from the bloody pits in my predecessor, he said, "And you, you are the next."
I stopped walking twenty feet away.
I said, "No. I'm not standing at a fork in the road. You're obviously a fork-in-the-road killer, and I am not at a fork in the road."
He licked his teeth and said, walking, "Well, I'll just walk to you, then."
I said, "No. You can't just switch over. You can't just be a 'fork-in-the-road killer' and then a 'road killer' like that. That's stupid."
"I can do what I like, and I like killing," he said. He had stopped walking.
I called him stupid again. I asked if he really liked killing, as I walked towards him.
Yes, yes he liked killing. He liked it very much. He didn't know how to not like it.
So I motioned to him without words that I would like to handle and examine his axe. He handed it over. I looked over it, it must've been recently purchased from a hardware store. It had a bright yellow rubberized handle and a black blade. It was made for chopping down young trees and brush, not for use as a weapon.
"If you like killing," I began, "you must like a lot about killing."
"Yes, I like a lot about killing."
I waggle my finger, my point wasn't finished. His eyes were black with large whites, his head was shaved and devoid of hair or lash completely and he gnashed his small, straight teeth like some dread insect chewing on his tongue. He was listening, though. His head was tilted even though his eyes were wide and sunken and burning at me.
"Surely you like both sides of killing."
He was perplexed.
"To like killing fully, you must appreciate the reciprocation."
He was still puzzled, so I mimed murder. I pressed the blade into his adam's apple lightly, so he'd get the hint.
The axe, even though I was just pushing slightly from the blunt side of the metal with both hands, cut through him like butter. His head slid off and slapped like a cold steak onto the floor. It was honestly an unexpected result.
I frowned standing at the road. I carried his body to the river Thames (for some reason, I could walk it) and dropped him into it. He finished bleeding out by the time I had walked there.
I walked back to my road and walked to the fork. He stepped out from the woods, pale as soap with a scabby red line across his neck from where his head somehow suction-cupped back on. His eyes looked the same, and he looked clammy and unaware of his condition.
Even in my sleep, I could tell my hands were beginning to sweat. I looked into the dreadful eyes and searched for a distraction, some reason. His ghost or corpse or both looked like it was searching for reason or compensation for the death.
I laughed nervously and said, "That was a good trick, wasn't it?"
His sunken, burning eyes glazed over and he said, "Yes, yes it was. I never saw that coming!"
I swore we laughed.

TV's keep me up. If I hear any pattern of regular speech, I wake up.

I can pretty much sleep through everything. Music can put me to sleep, especially classical. I bought the soundtracks for the 'Lords of the Rings' movies, but if I put them on and start listening, I fall asleep -- classical music is too peaceful. I can fall asleep during a movie or TV show too.

Dreams or nightmares, it doesn't matter what's going on in the dream, but the moment I think "This is just a dream," I wake up. While this is great if you're having a nightmare, there have been a few erotic dreams where I wished it hadn't occurred to me that it was only a dream.

Sometimes, I will wake from a dream and think, "That would make a great story!" So I'll turn on my computer, and write a few notes, and save them before I go back to sleep. Once in a while, I'll look at it later and think about how I would continue the story... but usually, I look at what I wrote the night before and think, "This is crap. Why did I think this would make a good story? It doesn't even make sense!"

I've had dreams where I'm chased by a killer, or some killing is going on. I've had others where I'm forced to kill someone, either in self-defense, or because I'm in a war scenario. Sometimes the first one will turn into the second one, when I face the killer and take him out. Both types disturb me when I wake. While there are certain situations where I would kill without hesitation to protect myself or others, I do not look forward to it, and my subconscious apparently agrees.

*blinks at 6am between two sleeping cycles*

Wait, wut ?

Alright I'll finish my night first Oo

Duncan.Oliver wrote:

While this is great if you're having a nightmare, there have been a few erotic dreams where I wished it hadn't occurred to me that it was only a dream.

You're tellin' me! But, on the flipside, I sure am glad I wake before I'm forced to change my shorts; such an inconvenience that.

LOTR music sounds epic to sleep to.

Hm. It's interesting that you automatically wake up after realizing something is a dream. I hear if you can realize a dream's a dream, and stay asleep, you can start steering and creating in it. I can't do that, though. Even if I realize I'm dreaming, I stay asleep until I actually actively think, "I don't have time for this bullshit," and wake up to be productive. I'm mostly at the mercy of a world I'm immersed, but can act in. I'm thankful, though. I used to get night terrors, but with new-found mental control, they're mostly just surreal experiences.

Maybe all it takes is some reworking what you've written? :D

I won't lie, some of my dreams involve brutally murdering people for the fun of it. Although for the most graphic one to date, I WAS a viking in my dream. Bearded man-body and all, and it WAS a raid, so... I'll chalk it up to fulfilling my barbaric duties.

All of my dreams make no sense. Click for a doozy of a tale. Slightly R-rated, and sooo not in a good way.:

The viking dream was fucking brutal, though. XD

And as for the whole wet-dream conversation; I am so glad I have ladyparts. Makes the whole laundry issue manageable. x3

You know, sometimes, we should switch. Dreaming sucks for me. Only sometimes, thank God.

I don't have imagination. No, I mean it literal. I can't picture stuff in my mind. I can't even draw a friggin' circle in my head and see it, not even with closed eyes. I feel the motion, and it makes my head spin, I have to grab my right hand to make it stop, but there are no pictures.
(Sucks for maths, of course. And pretty much everything else, though I seem to be fine with writing.)
If I read, I don't picture. I take all the traits I'm given, for rooms, characters, fancy schmancy effects, alright, but they're facts I remember. Not pictures. My memory works like that, too. There are no pictures ... just words. Or a blur, which is mostly the case. Bad, bad memory. Except for facts...


Dreaming? Is like reading combined with imagination. I feel the movements, and damn it, if I kiss someone in my dream, it is very, very real - sadly, the same holds true for when I'm smashed to bits or wrapped in a tight cocoon of spider lace where I can't move, breath, or scratch myself. (Guess which part is worst. Right, the no-scratching.)
What little I can otherwise sense is either clad in heavy fog (ever played Silent Hill? Yeah, that fog, just worse) or completely black-and-white. Naah, rather grey. Shades of grey. I'm not only colorblind, I'm completely blind, though I have a sort of sixth sense for movement. I know where I'm going, what's around me, who's where, who I talk to, whom I touch ... though it's like coded information.
Did you know your brain saves every part of familiar faces somewhere else? They are only put together when you see that person. I think what I experience when sleeping is much like that. Bits and pieces of information, but not put together. Sometimes only a pair of eyes up close, lips, a hand, but never more than a single trait from persons I dream of.

Though what I dream ... you know, I wouldn't want to change, really. It's fun. I once wondered which sense I would miss most if I were to lose it, and it would be my eyesight. (No reading anymore. Now that sucks. Hard.) But in my dreams, I don't need to see, I just need to feel ... and I always know.
My dreams are crazy, I talk stupid stuff that makes perfect sense, get from one foggy environment to another (ever went to school like any day before just to end up in the jungle, fighting through hordes of zombies to get a golden spoon, only to have it snatched away by your sister's pet rabbit? That's still fairly normal), and end up being chased by something, only to awake. It's like watching a really friggin' good action movie with a stupid, 'wtf?'-like ending that leaves you baffled.
(And once I know I'm dreaming, it's only a matter of seconds until I wake. Aw, darn.)

I cannot imagine what that would be like Eliza, except that it would be beyond my worst nightnares to have my imagination taken away. I have always been able to picture stuff in my mind very clearly. In fact, that's one reason I have such a good memory; I can visualize 'writing' down notes, like a grocery list, and recall it later.

I've read that different people link their memory to different sense-images. Most people are linked to sight, which is why they can visualize things. I'm one of those. Some remember sounds better, etc. From what you described, it sounds as though your sense-imagery is linked to touch. Your kisses are very real in dreams. Your nightmare is to be crushed, or to be wrapped up, immobile. I'll bet some memory expert could tell you how to improve your memory, based on touch -- but I'm no expert, unfortunately. I just know what works for me.

Actually, I figured out quite early that I can memorize things best if I write them down. Repeatedly. And by hand - doesn't work on the computer, sadly. If it did, I'd have no problems learning my Latin vocabs. As it is, I'm way too lazy to write down every single vocab for twenty times. Though I'd bet that if I did, I would be as good at Latin as I'm at English.

The feeling of my dreams - that I'm walking around with eyes closed, like a sort of 'second eyelid' that's not physical, but rather mental - stays with me a long time in the morning and reminds me of when to go to bed at the evening. I'm not into all this shtuff about spiritualism or what have you not, but as best as I can describe this is as having second sight ... with tired eyes that wish to close.
Though sticking my head in a bucket of cold water helps to get even those 'eyes' open very, very wide.


You're probably right, though, PGM - and I do envy you a bit for your vivid imagination. I've never known it any different, alas. I was born without it, I guess ... so it's not like I have a crippled limb, the limb is simply not there. You can't miss what you don't know. If you catch my draft.

Reading is still friggin' more awesome than watching movies. Especially so if the author knows how to describe feelings decently. Damn, how those thrillers and horror books make me jump!

Well, if you can get shivers from reading a horror book, you can visualize at least that much. So I'm not too worried about you.

I have a different problem concerning sleep ; hypersomnia is a bitch since not only you fall asleep all the time, anytime, when you're bored (or any situation that could lead to a NAP ATTACK !). But it also takes a lot of your time away to useless sleep (although I love sleeping, when you nap 15, 16 hours straight, you have almost no time left to do anything constructive).

I think Eliza feels rather than seeing/picturing You just skip the "imagination" part since you just feel it right inside, and that gives enough information to that neurone you call a brain :p


I'm rather auditive and gesture-based memory (copying, doing a movement, linking a song to a course, to a specific travel, I still have shivers when I listen to songs I used for particular RPG sessions..)
It also explains why I can't stand silence, it doesn't scare me, but I just see something is missing. Well, having been raised in a very, very loud home where everything was always turned on, people screaming, and concerts DVD playing non stop on TV because someone was too drunk and fell asleep before turning it off kind of conditioned me to "live with it"
(and the 14 hours travel non stop in a car or in eco class in a flight helped me fall asleep in about every situation possible)

*waves a hand from underneath a pile of paper and books* I'm fine, just buried beneath Finals and papers. Be back active soon....I hope.

A quick note on dreaming for me. I dream in color, sound, and sometimes touch. One of the fringe benefits from having a very active imagination.

i think i learn best when i listen couse i can remember stuff people said years ago, not evry thing but sometimes comments they have made come back to me when i talk to them and all i need to do in school is listen and i learn

regarding dreams i almoste never remember any of them and the last one i realy remember is from when i was like 8 years old, and it was about me chrashing a car into a mirror while going up for a stairway and the car broke not the mirror after that i whent to the top by fot and jumped(i think) of the end of the stairway

Hello Sio, I just read the spoiler bracket for your, "doozy of a tale" and it's funny you should mention sinus problems because three days ago I was prescribed an albuterol inhaler and prednisone and azithromycin in pill form. It was on the fifth day of my living death that I decided to make an appointment. Idiot. On the lab order there were words like, "legionella" and, "chlamydia." That last one threw me because I'm a virgin who has never made third person sexual contact.

My nose bled yesterday for the first time in seven years and I was enthralled with how easily the drops tainted the clear water of the toilet in its entirety. As the drops of blood hit the water, they lost most of their momentum and were forced into tumbled spheres. Slowly and most elegantly, they spent the last of their engery unfurling to spirals whose tendrils were exquisitely well-ordered and tapered with the subtlety and grace of the most beautiful eyelashes one can imagine. The tendrils themselves dissipated into the small crimson cloud of initial impact with the surface of the water. The color red was inconceivably vivid, rich, and altogether captivating. The tendrils really did it for me.

I guess there's really nothing more particularly invasive than a man's penis. But, they're also used to create the cutest, little, pudgey-faced babies you ever did see in your whole entire life! My nephew is five now and I still remember his, "new baby smell." Man, there ain't nothin' better, I tell yah.

I had a similar fondness for watching blood drops in the water when I was young, about 7 years old. I kept getting into my father's shaving kit, slicing my finger tip, and watching the sink. It scared my parents half to death, but honestly, I didn't do it often, and it wasn't like it was all that harmful. xDD

I've never taken the time to sniff the babies.

Did the lab assume you had chlamydia and ran a test for it?

I'm kind of concerned about the circumstances under which whomever lost their male sex in my dream. As a whole, my dreams run into a kind of continuity, as one relates to the other as a history of a world. SOMEONE OUT THERE (in my head/dreams) IS PRETENDING TO BE OKAY. This is still terribly disconcerting. xDD

Sio wrote:

I've never taken the time to sniff the babies.

It's very similar to the smell of the skin between cat toes (provided the paw is devoid of pee or poop) but, with notes of baby formula.

Quote :

Did the lab assume you had chlamydia and ran a test for it?

No. Heh-heh. I told the primary care physician my right testicle was in the habit of autonomously receding into my body cavity since 1999 and that I experienced a rare and wholy infrequent pain in what I thought might be a blood vessel leading to the testicle just above and to the right of it. I'm guessing she based her assessment on said evidence. I can't wait to see the urologist because it means a previously unresolved issue is that much closer to being resolved. Whoo hoo! Maybe I should shave? Yes, I think I will.

Quote :

I'm kind of concerned about the circumstances under which whomever lost their male sex in my dream. As a whole, my dreams run into a kind of continuity, as one relates to the other as a history of a world. SOMEONE OUT THERE (in my head/dreams) IS PRETENDING TO BE OKAY. This is still terribly disconcerting. xDD

Your dreams have continuity? Naw, no flipping way! Ha-ha-ha! Man, I'd give my left and consequently, perfectly contented testicle for just two days of that business!

oO

What ?

......*blink, blink* I'm with Claudia.

z.o.o. wrote:

It's very similar to the smell of the skin between cat toes (provided the paw is devoid of pee or poop) but, with notes of baby formula.

Cat toes, I'm familiar with. Baby formula, not so much. xD

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Maybe I should shave? Yes, I think I will.

Hm, in preparation for a thorough exam, I don't see how it could hurt. o:

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Your dreams have continuity? Naw, no flipping way! Ha-ha-ha! Man, I'd give my left and consequently, perfectly contented testicle for just two days of that business!

Hahaha, it's all great until you start to discover the more unsavory things in a dreamsetting. My dreams contain no real symbolism to speak of, and I'd consider every entity I meet as a unique personality. I've even noticed minor changes in some of them, such as a change of clothes, age, hair style, mortality, as the dreams shift in the continuity. Keeping track of whom I've met, or even what time period is difficult. This is sometimes a problem, as I have this false erotic dream that always has the same woman (consequently one that also looks a lot like another dream woman who was very charming but much less sexually driven,) who seems to have a serious giggling problem.

I say that my dreams have a kind of continuity, but in reality, I'm not always the same person myself, which makes reoccurring situations, such as the false erotic dream kind of a running gag in so far as my dreams go.

Basically, she leads me on, and as soon as the kissing or touching gets serious, she gets ticklish, which, because I'm familiar with communicating without speaking, means she isn't actually that much in the mood. It's frustrating, but when I wake up I have to laugh a little and remember fondly the reoccurring giggle-bitch. It's hard to recognize her straight away, because the time may be a different era, or she has completely reinvented her wardrobe. Something. She always dresses sharply, though, which is something to look forward to.

Going back to the time shift aspect; I thought gathering facts was difficult in day-to-day living, but shifting decades or days at a time is torture. xD
Sometimes, if I'm mixed up enough, I inadvertently foretell the 'passing on' of an entity before they should know such information. I don't have much control over that, either. The most that happens is that we both share a helpless moment in the face of fate.

Sometimes the information I gather bleeds over into my waking world. I have seen the information on a file, of my unborn baby brother, accurate to the date of my mother's miscarriage. I have confirmed these facts that he should be ten years old this year, and that his name had "Adam" in one of the secondary names. A door past the file room I was in opened up seamlessly to a house on a rainy property, with a large oak tree, on twenty acres of land on the end of a dirt road. I assume it represents some sort of ancestral home. When I arrived, the air around the property had a menacing, vengeful, abandoned quality about it. I heard distant wailing that grew louder at the oak tree. He was crying from under the ground until I unburied him, he was a well-formed infant, but deathly cold to the touch. I told him we will meet as a family one day if he promises to be patient, and placed him, smiling, back into the ground. The heart-wrenching air of abandonment dissipated, but the rain stayed behind. It was a soothing, I believe permanent, kind of rain. When I asked my mother about him after waking the following day, she cried for hours, but felt resolve for something she had been wrestling with for some time.

The last entity I knew that was entirely dreamworld unique that passed away left me 20 million quid, so at least money is no longer a problem in my dreams. I miss him more than I like the new fortune, though. He was a pen pal in a reoccurring dream where we would write letters that started as simple greeting, and progressed to telling secrets and philosophizing. Eventually, I learned he was an elderly englishman who owned a small but successful and respected law firm. He told me of the problems he had with his sons, who grew up, because he hadn't been around much, to love money more than the love of people. He often wondered if working to build his business so well was worth it. His children didn't resent him, they just grew up rather two-dimensional, and he was heartbroken to see it. He and I met in person when he invited me in one of his last letters, when I learned his specific identity. He had invited me over to tell me he was dying, which left me speechless, sitting in his warm, dark wood embellished conference room. I was thumbing through an old leather book by the fireplace when he said so. He died within two weeks, counting my awake and dreaming times.
I still feel weird, how he left me a tenth of his entire fortune simply for talking with him for some years. The thing that stuck with me the most was how strange I felt while I was in between finally being ready to openly grieve and assuming responsibility for my share of his estate, and how my real life mother, who was in my dream world for the first time, was practically back-flipping with excitement for us "being rich," while I wasted time pretending to check the rate of exchange on world currency to calculate the net worth into dollars for a new budget. I spend most of my fortune in dreams giving people things rather than investing in anything worthwhile.


Edit: Another interesting running gag in my dreams is this small conversational deja vu thing;
whenever I or someone else expresses that they want to kill someone, or they are angry enough to kill someone, someone always chimes in with "That's illegal."

I've even started saying it in real life, since it makes me chuckle. It's funny in a frustrating way when you're positively livid, and exclaim, "I COULD CHOKE THAT PERSON!!" and someone pipes in, "Uh, that's illegal." Total no-shit thing, but minding your legal obligation to not kill people is always good to take into consideration. xDD

Sorry if you guys are lost. xDD

I put the dream that started the chit-chat between z.o.o. and I in spoiler brackets so that people wouldn't have to read it unless they wanted, but I guess it doesn't matter, since an extended conversation came from it anyway. x3