Saturday, September 03, 2005

more crazy sleep psychology

I'm not sure if last night's episode would count as sleep walking. There was definately intense interactions between my sleeping, dreaming brain and my senso-neuro-motoro-impulse-system, as I will be calling it from here on out.

I seem to remember that I was sleeping quite soundly. I seem to remember feeling something on my arm. There was probably something on my arm, a spider or insect of perhaps, and quite likely, a strand of my rather long and unruly hair drifting easily in the quiet fan's breeze.

This seemed to trigger a rather rapid cascade of dreams/images in my mind of different organisms in my bed. I distinctly remember spiders and a bird. This cascade ended with the idea of one large and three small snakes laying right next to my head.

The most interesting part of the dream was that the snakes were done in a very Wes Anderson 'Life Aquatic' Jaguar shark sort of way. The snakes looked kind of animated but kind of real. They were very brightly colored in yellows and browns and oranges and in my dream, this tipped me off immediately to the fact that they were, indeed, copperheads.

Needless to say this really freaked me out so I jumped out of bed (not in the dream, for real) covered the place on my bed where I thought the snakes were with a pillow and turned on the light. I then proceeded to very cautiously and with great trepidation quickly flip the pillow over in the hopes of discovering my reptilian bed guests.

They were not concealed by the pillow.

I remember being quite distressed at this fact because they could be anywhere in the room, ready to strike with their venomous fangs from any shadowy corner. It's during these rather unsettling thoughts that I seemed to remember thinking, 'there's no fucking copperheads in my room, and besides, copperheads are not THAT brightly colored.'

So then I went to take a piss, noticing it had only been a little more than one hour since I had retired.

2 comments:

Brian said...

The spectre of Descartes strikes again!

I dreamed that I went to the Vid and got totally plowed. After getting home from the Vid, me and some other people came to my house. Exhausted from all the drinking and shenanigans, I decided to go to bed; however, there were two girls in my room who kept chatting me up. I was going in and out of sleep, laying in my bed, in my sleeping apparel, but they would not get the clue. Of course, being the good host that I am, I could not kick the ladies out. Eventually, in the dream, I drifted back into wakefulness to find they had left, by which time the sun was well situated in the sky thereby letting me know that the rest of my day was to be spent in a groggy, sleep-deprived haze.

Annoying feature of this dream: aside from the fact that the girls had nothing interesting to say, I did, in fact, go to the Vid last night and consume a fair amount of alcohol. When I got home, I was up late chatting with a friend online about relationships and victorian ideals. So, when I woke up, I was in a state of confusion, not being able to distinguish the dream from wakefulness (ah, Cartesian woes!). I was under the impression that I did not get enough sleep (which was false) and that I had tossed and turned until the sun came up (also false). But in those moments of incoherence that usually follow my waking up, I cannot think critically, much less be expected to tease apart dreams from reality, especially when the night before is a foggy memory at best. Anyway, now I am in a bad mood, the residue of my Cartesian delusions. False beliefs can effect psychological change even after one has rejected them from his web of beliefs.

kalle b said...

This is my little Cartesian delusion: last night at about 4am I was sleeping and dreaming (in Italian), and I definitely heard someone knocking at my door. I woke up, went to open the door, but nobody was in the corridor. However, I still would say that someone knocked.
I guess we should all go to the health center next week and have our pineal glands checked.