Vivid Dreams

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I had a vivid dream last night. I was lost in transit. I was traveling by flight and became lost along the journey. I landed in a large airport such as the one near Chicago. It had a combination of five separate flight paths. Four were flights within the U.S. and the other airport was international only flights. Somehow I landed in the airport and lost my way. Maybe I traveled to the wrong runways or maybe something else, but I was about to lose my flight. It was crazy. I had lost my tickets, my identification, everything and I was totally, utterly lost. My connecting flight was about to take off. I am running Helter Skelter.



So needless to say, I was in a bit of stress. Time was ticking and the flight was about to takeoff, somewhere. But where? But where? I was in a bit of panic. Eventually, I found a calm flight attendant. She said, "Don't worry. All will be fine. We will figure it all out."

At night, I wear my watch. It has a unique and special feature. It preforms sleep tracking. My fitbit watch records my sleep pattern each night. It allows me to track the various stages of sleep I experience throughout the night with great detail.

During a normal sleep period, you progress through four to five sleep cycles. Each sleep cycle is made up of four individual sleep stages.

The four stages of sleep are further broken down into two categories: rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep. These categories are important because what happens during REM sleep is dramatically different from what happens during non-REM stages.

The first three stages of sleep are composed of non-REM activity. Stage 1 is short, representing the act of dozing off and transitioning into sleep. In Stage 2 the body and mind slow down as you settle into sleep. It’s easiest to be awoken during these first two stages.

In Stage 3, also known as deep sleep, the body is in recovery mode, slowing down even further. At the same time, overall brain activity slows and shows a tell-tale pattern of pulses of activity that are believed to help prevent unwanted awakenings.

The fourth stage is REM sleep. During REM periods, brain activity shoots back up to levels similar to when you’re awake – which explains why REM is associated with the most intense dreams. While breathing and heart rate increase during REM sleep, most muscles are paralyzed, which keeps us from acting out those vivid dreams.

Each sleep cycle takes between 70 and 120 minutes. In the first sleep cycles of the night, more time is spent in non-REM sleep. The majority of REM sleep happens during the second half of the night. The progression of sleep stages and cycles in one sleep period is known as sleep architecture.

As a result I am able to observe and record in quite a bit of detail my nightly sleep. During this particular night, I experienced 1 hour and 25 minutes of Stage 3 NREM sleep between 10:30 P.M. and 1:30 A.M. But I then experienced 1 hour and 22 minutes of REM sleep between 5 A.M and 7:30 A.M.

So my period of Vivid Dreams took place during my REM cycle.

In the early morning, you wake up and if you inspect your mind, you can open up the events of your REM sleep. But you have to work hard to do this because your body immediately wants to return back to sleep. And all the events of the night are lost when you finally wake up and begin your day.

Round 2 - Another Vivid Dream

I couple nights ago, I experienced another vivid dream. I woke up at 5 A.M. and I said wait a minute. I was having a vivid dream. Unlock it and see what was there. Here is what I found.

I was attending a class in college. (This doesn't make any sense since I am 75 years old and permanently retired. But this was my dream at work.) As I was saying, I was attending a class in college. I was assigned to provide an analysis by tomorrow. A young woman was assigned to work with me. I had knowledge of the subject but was totally overwhelmed by other life conflicts. So I didn't really have the time. I discussed the subject with her and then went off to work on my other real life problems.

The next morning, I attended the class. I let the young woman present our findings. I felt like I failed. She presented a fantastic rendition of the concept, very artistically drawn and multi layered. The teacher of the class was very impressed. It was beautiful.

Bottom line - We made a great team.

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So I analyzed my sleep cycle for the night.

I had 1 hour 4 minutes of Deep NREM sleep between 9 - 12:30 P.M.
I had 1 hour 15 minutes of REM sleep between 3 - 6 A.M.

My vivid dream occurred at the end of my sleep cycle during REM sleep.

Round 3

I woke up this morning around 5:30 A.M. for a potty break and then went back to bed. Then I thought, Before I got up, was I just dreaming? I dove back in time and realized I just had another Vivid Dream. So I quickly went into action. I had to recall the dream because if I went back to sleep, it would be lost by morning. So I got up and found a pad of paper and wrote what little bit I remembered.

In the morning, I used my advanced Fitbit to record the events of the evening.

I had 1 hour and 6 minutes of Deep NREM sleep.
I had 1 hour and 2 minutes of REM sleep.
I woke from the Vivid dream at the end of a long period of REM sleep.

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These Vivid Dreams do not need to make much sense. They are dreams after all. In this dream:

I had purchased a small electronic tool. I used it for a couple days and the tool died. I took it back to the store and they replaced it. I used the new tool and it also failed after a short while. But this time I did some reverse engineering to determine the cause of the failure. The tool had about 100 components. It was easy to identify the component that failed. I reversed engineered the device and made it operational. They had used a cheap component and it was a bad design. I took the device back to the store and pointed out the failed component. I sensed that they were dealing with many failed items. Many people were returning the item back to the store. They were clueless. They didn't understand the basic principles of Trouble Shooting.

This is front page news Jimmy?

https://youtu.be/OJzTWX3OnW4

I wasn't quite sure of your point. But the image tracks to the following.

I would think that it would be obvious.

I was just echoing Cyberdad by saying that your two long posts about dreams dont add up to anything of obvious newsworthiness...by sarcastically saying "I will alert the media" about them. Sir John Gielgud delivers the line better than I can. Lol!

So your response to both of us should be to...get to the nub of the issue...a briefly state why these dreams you are having are of concern to you.

Where does the old saying "Sleep on It" come from?

Many people find that making difficult decisions is easier if they are well-rested. In addition to this, “sleeping on something” allows someone to separate oneself from the immediate issue to examine it more objectively at a later time. This is the reasoning behind this idiom, which has been around since at least the 1500s.

An early example can be found in the State Paper of Henry VIII (1519):

His Grace…sayd that the wold slepe and drem upon the matter.

Some people might assume that the idea that sleep can help people make the best decision is a silly one, an old wives’ tale. However, there is scientific evidence that suggests that sleep can have a positive influence on decision-making. The unconscious mind may be better at synthesizing information than the conscious mind. Also, someone who is fatigued makes more mistakes than someone who is alert and wide awake.

Sometimes folks find solutions to waking problems in dreams.

Like the chemist trying to synthesize benzene. After long hours he still couldnt get how the atoms lined up in what he assumed was a simple chain. But in a dream he saw snakes dancing around...and one snake bit its own tail and formed a ring...and upon awakening he realized that the benzene molocule must be a ring...and succeeded in synthesizing it.

So what is it that wrestling with in your waking hours ...that your..."sleeping on"...may I ask?

And shouldnt you have posted this in one of the two "what was your latest weirdest dream?" threads in "Random"?

Why did you put it in "Current Events"?

Another term we inherited from the olden days is "mull over it". which has similar connotations where one goes away and reflects on something and come back when they have had time to think about it with a clear head.

I usually enjoy dreaming. I get along very well with people in my dreams. I am not sure if it's that I'm not autistic in my dreams or the other way around that every one is autistic, but everyone I interact with seems to be "clicking" with me.

O.K. I will try and answer your question. About 3 years ago, I suffered a major stroke. Essentially my heart stopped beating for over 5 minutes during my sleep and I died. All of the valves in my heart stopped beating. Then there was a spark of electricity and my heart began to beat again. But the damage was already done. In four regions of my body, significant damage occurred. One was in my brain. I suffered something very similar to what Bruce Willis has recently experienced. It is called Aphasia. I lost my ability to read. Each of the letters broke apart from words and then the letters themselves broke apart into pieces and then reconstructed themselves into a new alphabet system, one that I could not read. If that wasn't bad enough, I also lost all my knowledge of words. It is very hard to communicate without words.

So I have made significant progress in recovering but approximately 2 or 3 percent of my brain cells have been destroyed. Because these brain cells are constructed in series and parallel patterns in my brain, a very large area was affected but I have been able to restore much of this in the first 3 months after the stroke. But still, I am a work in process.

One of the interesting things that only people who experience death know, the human brain will continue even after it dies. So I have been very busy learning things that only the dead know. Each day I explore many different areas and absorb new knowledge. In a sense my brain is in overdrive mode.

At the moment, I am exploring the two sides of my brain, the left and the right sides. The daytime and the night time brains. In order to properly heal the damage done by the severe stroke, I must repair both sides of my brain. Therefore it is essential for my to monitor and understand my night time world.

So to answer your latest question. This is a current event for me. I am in process.

This is an interesting statement. One of the points you are discussing is the primary cause of Asperger's Syndrome. In my opinion, as a small child I died. I was attacked by an animal that weighed almost 100 time my weight and I died around age 3 or 4. (This was around 1951 or 1952.) I came back but it was my right side of my brain that came back. The left side of your brain is normally the dominant side, the daytime brain. So the cause of my Asperger's Syndrome was my early death experience. But now I am trying to repair another problem. Three years ago, my heart stopped beating and I died again. It is hard to recover from death. It takes a lot of work.

BillyTree, realize that your night time brain that exist in REM and deep NREM sleep is very different then your daytime brain. It is like night and day. One operates in a series pattern and the other one operates in a parallel pattern. One is very fast but makes a lot of mistakes. The other is very slow but is very accurate in arriving at solutions. But it takes both sides of your brain, the one on the left and the one on the right to figure things out. Thus the phrase "Sleep on it".

Sorry that that happened to you.
Thanks for answering the questions.
I salute the courage and perseverance your showing in recovery.

Thanks for your thoughts on this. I find my dreams very fascinating and sometimes mysterious. For example, last night I dreamt that I explained to a person was a panic attack is. As an example I described a panic attack I myself had a couple of years ago. When I woke up this morning I asked my self "What panic attack? I have never had a panic attack in my life."