Eff Sleep: Pipe Dreams and Other Dream-like Things I’m Too Tired to Understand

The other night, I was sleeping soundly and I woke up suddenly to a text message and realized I was dreaming of doing Kettle bell swings with a giant clock ticking off the minutes.  I’m a dreamer, not in the John Lennon sort of way, but in the whilst sleeping some crazy shit happens behind my eyelids. I also walk in my sleep, talk, and sometimes even do lunges. Okay, that happened once, but it freaked me out a little bit anyways.

I also regularly wake up to the imagined “bing” of a new incoming message or meeting reminder on Outlook (I have four email accounts) or formulate emails responses during my dreams that are sheer genius.  I’m always running late in la la land  (but that’s sorta true in real life as well.)  I am also regularly chased, or chasing, being hunted, and for some reason alligators are a common character in my dreams.  Sometimes they smoke cigarettes.  I have no idea what that part means.

Changing my schedule always does crazy things to me and the past few weeks is no exception.  I have recently taken to getting up earlier even apprentice teaching a 5:30 Pilates class at my gym on occasion and I’m reminded that three hours of sleep aren’t really enough when you’re twisting yourself, and others, into a pretzel that early in the morning.  Drowning myself in coffee has been my morning ritual and bleary eyed and cursing the high moon at 4:20 I get out of bed and stand dejectedly beneath the shower head as cold as I can stand the current of water hoping to shock my system into functionality. It has about a 50% effectiveness rating.

Don’t get me wrong, I am used to very minimal sleep and am actually highly functional taking about one day every three to four months to pass out and sleep for about 14 hours, recharging my batteries, and continuing on down my merry, sleepless little way.  I’m not even unique.  Single parents, working parents, road warriors, and Russian linguists (okay, that’s a specific someone I know) all regularly burn that proverbial candle at both ends and sleep is the ultimate casualty.  My friend Todd always tells me, “Sleep is a crutch.”

However, I realized I hit new levels of weird today, when I fell asleep.  Sitting up.  At my computer.  When I emerged suddenly, and with a dried line of drool trailing down my cheek 55 minutes later, I felt refreshed and the email I had been composing was still waiting for me.  I fell asleep mid-typing the phrase “full body integration”.  I think it was somewhere between the body and integration that I nodded off and I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was typing it for in the first place…

I work from home and regularly pass by my bed, my glorious King Sized Sleigh bed with Egyptian cotton sheets and four body length pillows longing for a dreamless stretch of 8 – 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep.  But ironically, it is merely a pipe dream.  A pipe dream I’ll probably have cut short tonight by a marathon of NCIS on the USA Network.