UNITED STATES—As of late, I haven’t really slept much at all and its not a good thing at all. I get in the bed, I try to sleep, only to find myself tossing and turns for hours, by the time I finally fall asleep it is time to get up to start the day. I’m not going to tell you its frustrating, because IT IS FRUSTRATING.
What is the one thing doctors and health professionals are saying we need more of? It is sleep, but the average American barely sleeps at night. Of course, the recommendation is 7 to 8 hours a night. Yeah, that has not transpired for me in years. The only way that even becomes a possibility is if I am flat-out exhausted. When I say exhausted, I mean exhausted to the point that I couldn’t even tell you what day it is. That was something that absolutely transpired a few years back when I was juggling 3 jobs at once while in school, but that is besides the point.
I want to talk about dreams because as of late, I have been having some bad dreams, ones that appear so realistic, so visceral that they shake me out of my sleep to the point that I cannot go back to sleep. This isn’t happening once every blue moon, its happening often, and frequent to say the least.
I’ve been telling myself I really need to document my dreams to see if I’m seeing a pattern unfold. Just off the cusp, I’m not seeing one, but it feels like they are tackling trauma or attempting to say something about how I deal with trauma in my life. I can’t believe I’m going to write this, but I have dreams that sometimes manifest themselves in real life. I don’t want to call them premonitions because they’re not.
Things transpire in my dreams that days, weeks, months, hell, years later happen in real life. I cannot explain it in a word, but I feel the trigger and it jolts me. I realize what just happened in real life unfolded before and it scare me sh**less. A lot of my bad dreams involving something horrific happening to me, notably death or me reacting to emotions that I have allowed to build up and I finally let how I feel come out.
I’ve only had 1 dream so bad that it woke me out of my sleep drenched in sweat. I remember it so vividly that I refuse to even talk about it with anyone because I am afraid of putting it into existence, but something that vivid you just don’t forget, ever. I’ve been wondering if I should see a sleep specialist to see if there is an issue that prevents me from getting quality sleep at night. My biggest fear is a doctor prescribing medicine that I become reliant on to sleep.
I don’t want that to become a norm. I want to naturally sleep like any other human being, but we’re not all the same. The best sleep I get is from these micro-naps that I take during the day when and if possible. I feel like I’ve slept for hours, even though it has only been 20 mins. Sleep has always fascinated me because it delivers and out-of-body experience that even scientists still don’t understand till this day, maybe that explains my fascination with abnormal psychology and my drive to really understand dreams, sleep and why they transpire in the first place.
Written By Jason Jones
