Tag Archive for: sleep

Of Dreams and Work and Working Dreams

Cassandra.mllr / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

I don’t generally dream, or at least if I do, I don’t remember dreaming, for the most part. Occasionally, if I fall back asleep in the morning hours when I should be getting out of bed, I will have short, strange dreams that I can recall, but for the most part, I have no active dream life.

Lately, I’ve been dreaming about the food bank – specifically, how to configure boxes and pack them efficiently, what kinds of food we have left on the shelves that we can share, what supplies we need to order to bolster our pantry. I am usually a champion sleeper – falling fast asleep within minutes and sleeping soundly for 7-8 hours at a time. But in the last two weeks, my sleep has been restless, dreaming of squatting to pack cardboard boxes with dry goods furiously, sliding them across the concrete floor to stack higher and higher. I dream for a while, wake to acknowledge that it’s a dream, roll over and begin again. All night long. Strangely, I wake rested, but by 3:30pm I am exhausted and ready to nap on the couch with the dogs.

This morning when I stepped out of the shower, recalling last night’s dreams of scrolling Costco lists and counting the jars of peanut butter we have left in storage, I shook my head, remembering the other times in my life when I dreamt like this. I recalled my first job as a waitress, my sleep peppered with scenes of heavy trays of clam chowder and sourdough bread, refilling coffee cups and forgetting the creamer, sliding across the kitchen floor as I smeared my rubber-soled shoes through a spill someone had left behind. I dreamt like this again when I took a job managing the wait list for children’s inpatient psychiatric care, imagining spreadsheets and databases, sorting by county and age and number of days in foster care.

This is my brain’s way of working out how to master something new. It’s what I do, and even as it is repetitive and lasts for weeks, it is not something that feels distressing to me. I have come to appreciate it as a way my brain works while my body rests.

I volunteered for a while leading groups for parents of newborns. I spent 12 weeks with couples or just mothers with new babies, helping them build community, giving them a safe space to vent and find solidarity with others, and teaching them about the unique qualities and milestones their children would make their way through. I remembered those days of sleepless nights, not ever feeling like you were on solid footing, reinventing every single day anew. I didn’t dream during those times, mostly because I never slept long enough between feedings or rocking my babies at night to get to that stage of sleep.

But I do remember counseling new moms about their babies’ sleep patterns. I remember cautioning them that even when their babies did settle in to an overnight routine – sleeping 5 or more hours at a time – that every time they came to a new milestone, their sleep would be restless again for a while. A week before they figure out how to crawl, many babies will revert to old ways of waking over and over again in the night. They repeat this when they’re learning to walk, and talk, and when they start solid foods. I imagine it the same way my brain works to figure out something new, to master a new skill or task. And so while it is stressful and frustrating for parents to feel as though they have finally gotten their baby to sleep for a long stretch at night and then have to go backward, what their babies really need during this time is care and comfort. It is hard work creating those new neural pathways, but once created, they serve us well for most of the rest of our lives. In general, once we learn to crawl, we never forget how to do it. Same with walking and talking.

It is a reminder to me to nurture my own disrupted sleep as my brain toils to find a better solution, and to react to my teens with compassion as they stay up later and later or lie in bed for 12 hours and come down for coffee still looking like they haven’t slept much at all. We are all, in our own way, working out how to manage this time in a way that feels right and sustainable for us. Like I tell my newborn parents, the least we can do is be gentle with each other and know that even if we can’t see it happening, there is magic going on in our heads that takes time to work through.

Noodling

I really like that word and all it conjures up for me. I “noodle” a lot on any given day. When I read something that strikes me or a particular circumstance piques my attention like it hasn’t before, if I give myself the space and time to think on it, I often find nuggets of wisdom or a way of seeing the world differently.

Yesterday, a friend posted a link to this article on bimodal sleeping. If you have the time, go read it. It’s really interesting and basically says that our ancestors used to go to bed early (around 8:30pm), sleep for several hours, awaken in the middle of the night and spend a few quiet hours reading or writing or praying or even communing with friends and family, and then go back to sleep for several more hours before beginning their day. It struck me for two reasons. First, because I know many perimenopausal and menopausal women who wake for several hours in the middle of the night and fret about it. This might be a new way of seeing that time in a more productive, relaxed fashion. Or not.  But the second reason I was taken by this article was because of the philosophical question the author asked about the nature of time and how we treat it. He says,

“I can definitely see the benefits of recognizing, and attempting to live by, a new understanding of time. Time as quality. Duration. Flavor….It’s not important to quantify time like we do. Maybe what’s needed is to step back and be present…”

All of a sudden, I envisioned us like fish in the sea, swimming in time. What if I can begin to see time as simply a medium through which I move instead of something that is finite and exhaustible? What if, instead of feeling like I can work like mad now and “store” time for retirement (ie. sleep more, relax more, do more of what I like when I have “more time,”) I don’t put so much emphasis on time itself? If it is simply the water through which I move as I pursue those things that are truly important, it ceases to be a taskmaster to which I answer every day.  Worth noodling on, I think.

I walk the dog at the same time every morning. We stroll the same path every time, encountering the high school students rushing to class and an occasional neighbor walking their dog, and it is a short walk, but there is comfort in the sameness of it. The dog does his business in pretty much the same place every day, rain or shine, and we see the same faces and houses every day. While there are minor changes from time to time – the leaves on the trees or the sidewalk, Halloween or Christmas decorations adorning the houses – they are the things I am drawn to because the basic structure and framework of the route remains the same.  This morning I happened to notice how dark it was outside and as the dog paused to sniff at something interesting, I noodled on it a bit. Two weeks ago we were in the midst of my favorite kind of days, the ones that bring cold, clear skies in the morning and brilliant sunshine in the afternoon that barely melts the frost on the grass. These mornings are fraught with a riot of color streaking the sky, the sun painting the few low clouds with glorious pinks and oranges and reds, and they are light.  For the past several days, we have awoken to dense fog or cloud cover that blocks the  morning sun and makes me feel as though I got up an hour too early. As I stood scanning the sky I could see clear spots pockmarking the clouds here and there and I marveled at how much a thin cloud cover can block the morning light.  I was reminded of the way that works in my brain, as well. Sometimes all it takes is a little frustration or stress to begin my day in darkness instead of light. Maybe now that I know this, I can work a little harder to find those pockets of clear sky and remind myself that the sun always comes up and just on the other side of those clouds is the warmth and clarity I want to reside in.

And for those following the saga of the ultrasound, an update: While there were no glaring issues, there was at least one question raised that prompted my doctor to request further testing and I am torn. I am thrilled that most of the results were negative for anything really bad, but since I have been feeling pretty darn good since about a week before the ultrasound (of course), I am tempted to chalk it all up to perimenopause and assume that my hormones will assert their will over my body for several years before they finally give up.  This may all change when and if I start feeling badly again, but for now what I really want for Christmas is to avoid the doctor for a while.

Just Be


There are moments when sleep is delicious. Better than any silky, creamy mouthful of cheesecake or the sharp tang of lemonade and ice in the summer. I think that it is the heaviness of sleep that I like the most. That feeling of weightlessness and immobility that occur simultaneously.

In the winter, as I lie between the worn flannel sheets under the solid weight of the down covers in absolute comfort, the perfect position, no twinges or itches to make me move, with Bubba’s warm solidity next to me and the darkness outside cloaking everything, I feel heavy and still. In those rare moments when the house is quiet except for the whum of the air through the vents and Bubba’s soft breathing noises and I am slack with sleep but aware, that weight is the most comforting and comfortable sensation I can imagine. In those even more precious moments when my mind is truly synchronized with my body and I am only aware but not alert, straining to see the red numbers on the clock or flexing my ears to listen for the whine of the dog or sparking my brain to begin wondering, I am at peace. This moment, this feeling, this discrete space in time is. It just is.
There will be time for waking and working and moving, but when I find those snatches of peace in every realm and don’t feel the need to stretch them out (which makes them pop like so many soap bubbles) or make them last or dispel them myself before they run out on their own, I am grateful for the heaviness of sleep.