I’m talking with a stranger about backyard duty. The afternoon’s sun is beaming down. It appears to be late summer in Texas (where I’m most familiar with late summers). Everything has a yellow/orange hue and there’s the buzzing of bugs that you can always hear but never see. The stranger tells me how he is jealous of the yard work that I was able to accomplish that day. I tell him that it wasn’t that big of an accomplishment and proceed to offer pointers. He shrugs as he sits down on a nearby bench looking at his phone. He’s dressed in typical summer attire: blue t-shirt, black shorts, and white shoes. I notice a black salamander running by his feet. I become hyper focused on the salamander and my view zooms in on it. Somehow, I’m able to see it breathing, its belly going in and out. As I’m looking at the salamander, I feel something crawling on my head? How could this be? I’m alone and there’s nothing near me. Little do I realize that all of these random conversations and feelings are all apart of a dream. But wait… if I “feel” something in this world, then something must be touching me in the REAL world, right!?!?
I erupt out of sleep and out of the comforts of my bed. What was just crawling on me?!?! Were the sensations in my dream that powerful? I begin to search the sheets and the pillows for an explanation of the sensation, but to no avail. Now I’m in a state of distrust. Do I risk going back to sleep and back to the mercy of the unknown creature? Can I trust my deep dream-like state to not generate spooky phantoms? The only thing that is certain in this moment is that it’s 3 in the morning and I should fight for 3 more hours of sleep. Off I go….
I’ve been in this mental position before. While living in a quasi-studio apartment (it was a fully furnished bottom floor of a 3 story townhouse), I was in a dreamlike state, only to be awoken by an odd sensation on my neck. Only this time, it was a very real Virginian centipede. If I’m able to feel a creature crawling across my “temple”, am I getting enough deep sleep? After doing some reading on sleep, it could really just be the way that I’m wired.
Aren’t naps lovely? I love a good nap. Somehow, not everyone feels the same way. Allison, of the Washington Post, wrote about naps in the following article below. She said how she would take naps, under the belief that she would feel better, only to wake up feeling as if she contracted the flu. Well it turns out “some adults are genetically predisposed to need more hours of continuous sleep than others”. It could simply be that I’m not good at maintaining deeper sleep, BUT am able to find deep sleep faster. That explains why some folks say they need 9 hours of sleep while others only need 5 hours (but always seem to disappear for 30 minute increments during the day and you notice their shoes in the bathroom stall during their absence). The scare of an unknown creature crawling on my noggin led me to believe that I should take more naps.
Leave a Reply