You May Say I’m A Dreamer
Sleeping usually comes very easily for me. In fact, in an effort to eradicate a bad habit of repeatedly hitting the snooze button, I once moved my alarm clock across the room so that I would have to get out of bed and walk a couple yards to turn it off. I discovered that I was able to do this, walk back to my bed, and go right back to sleep. Not only that, but if the alarm interrupted a dream, I could awaken, consciously make a round-trip to the clock, and resume the very same dream. That’s right, folks: you can force me out of REM sleep, and I don’t need to restart the cycle to get back where I was.
When I was a teenager, I briefly kept a record of my dreams, and they are mostly as strange and ridiculous as you might guess. I wish I had kept up my practice of dream documentation, for I would surely have enough material for a surreal novel or two by now. As it is, I remember only a tiny fraction of my somnambulistic journeys with any specificity. Aside from a handful of particularly memorable dreams (such as the one in which I was attacked by my knife-wielding doppelganger, who kept yelling, “I’m Robert the Cropper!”), I tend to completely forget what I dream within minutes or seconds of waking. But with four decades of dreaming behind me, there have been some recurring themes. Read More
