Quicksand Dreams

First off: I'M ALLLLIIIIVVVVVEEEEE!!!!!!

Phew. Mono, BLOWS, but I'm pretty much over this round. Hopefully my body will figure out how to crush it so it doesn't haunt me for what remains of my summer.

But that's not really why I wanted to write about.

I had an AH HA moment the other day. You know those ones, where for the split second after you answer your own question, you're immensely proud, only to nearly immediately sink into a pit of "Well....duh. I'm a tardface." then to rise momentarily when you figure that maybe other people have thought of the same and there's bonafide research, only to sink back down to "well....other people are tardfaces too."

Said AH HA moment, came shortly after listening to Dane Cook describe his super large, loafer wearing, lightening spitting crab dream on his album Harmful if Swallowed and his rather impressive bitch fest about how everything in dreams moves at light speed, but you (meaning the person having the dream), can hardly move at all.

To be precise, the moment came exactly after I woke up from my 5th unintentional nap (thanks Epstein Barr virus!) in one of my sick days, where I had been attempting to move chairs with the Joker, apparently to fulfill his nefarious plot of removing all of the chairs from Gotham, when I realized that not only was I not helping at all in the moving, but it was because I COULD HARDLY MOVE! All of my limbs were like filled with lead, or chocolate pudding, or something else heavy and strangely unwieldy.

I woke up, pissed, thinking about Dane Cook and running through quicksand, and my ah ha moment occurred.

REM is an incredibly powerfully brain-wavey part of sleep, where you're actually closer to being awake than at any other point, except instead of awareness, you get psychedelic, non-acid induced dream mayhem. Which, since being so close to awake, if it had a choice, your body would more than love to participate in.

Until of course that giant monster you were karate chopping? Turned out to be your significant other, now with a broken nose, and that piece of wood you kicked out of your way earlier in the night was your cat. Also, don't look in the kitchen. It's not worth the heartbreak.

So to prevent us from attempting to be like Jackie Chan wearing teddy bear pj shorts and a moo cow t-shirt, our body puts itself into a form of sleep paralysis. While in REM, your muscles are essentially unhooked from communication with your brain, so you can only act out your dreams where it's safe to....inside your head. This doesn't usually happen during any other phase of sleep, which is why sleepwalkers are rarely attempting to swing dance with hippos when they go for a midnight stroll, because they're in a phase of sleep where their muscles are able to move, but usually too sleepy to but also ergo not dreaming.

Despite this necessary paralysis, my theory, is that if you're having a particularly scary/exhilarating/irritating dream, the part of your brain that tells your body to move around, probably is really really trying to get your body to move! The harder it wants you to move and realizes your muscles have their headphones on and can't listen, the slower and more painful movement in the dream becomes as you try and fight muscles that physically can't work. (Dunno about you, but I tend to incorporate sounds and things in the outside world into dreams without knowing it, like my arm falling asleep turning into it being bitten by a snake or a clap of thunder translating into my awesome drum solo while on tour with Three Days Grace, etc.)

Basically, you're dreaming, you want to move around, you can't move around, dream you stops being able to move around, you wake up frustrated and agitated and wondering why you couldn't outrun the firebreathing squirrel, possibly not realizing that it's the very mechanism that keeps you safe that also kills you every night in your sleep.

It's just a theory. I tried to research it, but I kept getting dream journals like: "What does running slowly mean for your life...you're pregnant" and so on and so forth. So until someone has a better reason...I kind of like mine.