“Data indicate that some characteristic features of REM sleep stage dreaming, resulting to some extent from the neurobiological processes in the brain, resemble some of the symptoms of schizophrenia.” –Dagna Skrzypińska and Barbara Szmigielska, Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, 2013.
Don’t you find it odd that in some, if not most, sleeping dreams that you can remember you don’t realize you are in a dream while in it, only afterwards? What is the purpose of sleep? I find less than three hours a night makes the next day very difficult. As Hamlet soliloquized, death, like sleep, is ” a consummation/Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,/To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub,/For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause. There’s the respect/That makes Calamity of so long life:” They say once you achieve REM sleep, you are constantly dreaming; it is just that you only remember a fraction or none of the dreams upon waking.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant described madness as “a waking dream.” The poet Theodore Roethke in one of his most famous poems wrote, “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.” One of the most famous horror movies of the 1980s, A Nightmare on Elm Street, is about teenagers haunted by a bogeyman who abused them as children and is now haunting them in dreams and blurring the line between dream and reality. Also, is anyone else creeped out that “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” tells children four times that “life is but a dream”? Seems like child abuse to me.
My older brother, who is unlike me in a lot of ways, has no trouble sleeping. I almost envy him for it, but we are not supposed to envy anyone anything. It is one of the seven deadly sins. E.A. Robinson’s “Richard Cory” is one of the best poetic expressions of this moral:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
My brother isn’t suicidal, as far as I know. Far from it. He is just one of these people who is very calm and doesn’t worry about things that aren’t worth worrying about. We should all be so lucky.