Let us first remember the weirdness of dreams:

My dreams normally come true.  I know what you’re thinking, and I wholeheartedly disagree.  It’s not that my dreams are prophetic — or maybe it is.  It’s just that 99.9% of my dreams are ambiguously predictive.  What does that mean?  Simple: All but one in a thousand of my dreams cause me to experience déjà vu at a later date.

Again, I realize that makes me sound crazy, but it’s true.  No, I don’t dream of lottery numbers or who will win the next election or where to drill for oil.  My dreams, like so many others, are abstract and generally detached from current events.  They are almost always unremarkable.  Despite that, and it may be years later, I will almost always suddenly realize I have experienced something before.  It is then I fully remember the dream, an epiphany regularly augmented by the memories of when I dreamt it.  It’s weird.  I can admit that.  It’s also quite true and has never seemed out of the ordinary.  Then again, I don’t know what everyone else dreams about.

Most who read that will presume I have a mental problem, or that I make such remarkable claims to shower attention upon myself.

Untrue.  I have spent the majority of my life experiencing predictive dreams.  As I pointed out in that post more than a year ago, I don’t get specific information and don’t wake each morning knowing precisely what will happen.  Instead, my dreams generally seem like memories from a fugue state, abstract paintings on the walls of my mind that are generally unremembered until later.

Later when they come true.

This prognostication by sleep has never told me when to turn right instead of left, how to avoid an accident or speed trap, or what job offer to take so that I might enjoy a leisurely life without much effort.  On the contrary, I remember my dreams in the midst of otherwise mundane moments, yet they do often provide me with environment, conversation, and events that all come together in a simple realization: I’ve seen this moment before, I’ve been here before, I’ve had this discussion before, and I know what’s going to happen.

I’ll say this again: I know how insane that sounds.  I agree.  Wholeheartedly.  But it’s quite true.

Or, rather, it’s always been quite true until recently.

My dreams in the last two months or so have become something else entirely.  More and more I remember them the moment I awake, and more and more they remind me of the lunatic ravings of asylum inhabitants.  I mean more so than the dream I spoke of in that previous entry.  Vibrant and full of strange places and creatures, I now experience an intensity of dreams heretofore deemed alien in my own life.  I can’t explain how many of these fantastically troubling dreams I remember from just this week, let alone this month and the previous one.

The past month has provided me with a plethora of bizarre and troubling journeys through REM sleep, some of which easily could be labeled nightmares, yet I’ve dismissed this uneasy change in my night visions as nothing more than a sign of stress.  The intensity and craziness of them has reached a crescendo that deafens my mind and leaves me feeling less rested and more worried each morning.

Only now do I find my assumption was right as to the cause of this dreadful metamorphosis.  To wit:

Dreams are amazingly persistent. Miss a few from lack of sleep and the brain keeps score, forcing payback soon after eyelids close. “Nature’s soft nurse,” as Shakespeare called sleep, isn’t so soft after all.

“When someone is sleep deprived we see greater sleep intensity, meaning greater brain activity during sleep; dreaming is definitely increased and likely more vivid,” says neurologist Mark Mahowald of the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis.

The phenomenon is called REM rebound. REM refers to “rapid eye movement,” the darting of the eyes under closed lids. In this state we dream the most and our brain activity eerily resembles that of waking life. Yet, at the same time, our muscles go slack and we lie paralyzed—a toe might wiggle, but essentially we can’t move, as if our brain is protecting our bodies from acting out the stories we dream.

Work has continued to rob me of time and peace.  Worries about moving out of Dallas and to the country vex me at every turn.  My desire—nay, my need to focus on my writing churns my stomach and stabs me to the core.  The Kids represent my most critical, singular focus, yet I beat upon myself too often when I feel I’ve robbed them of the time and attention they deserve and need.  Friends and family mount requirements upon me both real and imagined, what with my needing to reach out to them, to visit them, to spend time with them, all in addition to the “can you do this?” and “can you do that?” episodes inherent in all personal relationships.  And the list goes on.

Throughout all of this I suffer by way of a decreasing amount of sleep, and that sleep has become more restless, more tumultuous, less satisfying.  And all because I’m sleeping less and dreaming more (albeit in raucous ways).

In a 2005 study published in Sleep, Nielsen showed that losing 30 minutes of REM one night can lead to a 35 percent REM increase the next night—subjects jumped from 74 minutes of REM to a rebound of 100 minutes.

Nielsen also found that dream intensity increased with REM deprivation. Subjects who were only getting about 25 minutes of REM sleep rated the quality of their dreams between nine and eight on a nine-point scale (one being dull, nine being dynamite).

Am I suffering from a lack of sleep that haunts me now as much as it has haunted me for many weeks?  I fear that’s true.

But the persistence of REM begs the question: Why is it so insistent? When rats are robbed of REM for four weeks they die (although the cause of death remains unknown). Amazingly, even though we spend about 27 years dreaming over the course of an average life, scientists still can’t agree on why it’s important.

Let’s hope my fate is not the same as these poor rats, and all because I work more and sleep less, labor beyond the norm and rest with decreasing regularity.

But allow me to finish this bit of introspection and self-evaluation with something from this article that I find intriguing: an explanation of our dream world.

Sleep is divided into REM and four stages of non-REM; each has a distinct brain wave frequency. Stage one of non-REM is the nodding off period where one is between sleeping and waking; it’s sometimes punctuated with a sensation of falling into a hole. In stage two the brain slows with only a few bursts of activity. Then the brain practically shuts off in stages three and four and shifts into slow-wave sleep, where heart and breathing rates drop dramatically.

Only after 70 minutes of non-REM sleep do we experience our first period of REM, and it lasts only five minutes. A total non-REM–REM cycle is 90 minutes; this pattern repeats about five times over the course of a night. As the night progresses, however, non-REM stages shorten and the REM periods grow, giving us a 40-minute dreamscape just before waking.

I hope the worlds I visit nightly become less ominous, less upsetting, less disturbing.  I hope I can get back to the kind of awe-inspiring rest I once enjoyed.

If only I could get through all these life events more quickly. . .