How's your REM?

I've spent some time exploring a website by a group called the DREAMS foundation, with the word DREAMS being an anachronism for Dream Research and Experimental Approaches to the Mechanisms of Sleep.

Anyone who knows me well knows I have struggled with insomnia for many years. I've had several people tell me there is a sleep lab in a town nearby where I could go get evaluated and possibly helped, but I have been extremely reluctant to do so. In the first place, I just don't like going to doctors for any reason. In the second place, I'm not willing to define my insomnia as being "something wrong with me" that needs treatment. I prefer to merely view it as a characteristic, like the fact that I have blue eyes or long toes. I notice it. I don't have to name it bad or wrong.

When my body gets tired enough, it WILL eventually sleep. Granted, sometimes I go through cycles of several days on minimal rest. But I cope.

Lately, however, I've been thinking more about the different states that my mind experiences. I've been comparing how I notice, perceive and interpret things when I am well rested to when I am very tired, or when I am just about to fall asleep, or when I am first waking up. Why is it that sometimes I am quiet and reflective, other times I am brash and bold, or other times other ways? How much does my sleep cycle have to do with that?

I find it interesting that I can sleep straight through a major thunder storm but I am awake instantly if a baby in the next room simply coughs. But then, on closer examination, only CERTAIN baby's sounds trigger that instant attention. Guests with babies who I feel so particular responsibility for are far less likely to wake me up, even with loud crying that those babies who are flesh of my flesh. How does my mind know the difference?

Then there is the whole world of dreams and what they mean. My dreams are some wild equation, part memory, part symbolic metaphor, part longing, part mystery. I remember them for a brief, fluid time when first waking up and then they disappear.
There is actually an International Association for the Study of Dreams which has been holding conferences for twenty four years now where serious academic papers are presented on the topic.

I'm not one to give too much credence to my dreams. At one point I kept a dream journal, writing down key aspects of my dreams when I first woke up. I have not done that in quite some time.

I have a hard enough time figuring out what my waking life means, I'll leave the dream world analysis to someone else!