I'm supposed to be doing a sleep study while I'm on vacation these two weeks. My sleep doctor tells me I have something called circadian rhythm disruption, which means that I naturally fall asleep way too late (2 or 3 in the morning), which is rather disturbing when you have to get up no later than 6:00. I've been using Ambien to help me sleep for over a year now and she wants me to stop. I am supposed to stay up as late as I can, not take the Ambien, wake up without an alarm, and then sit in front of a light box for 30 minutes in the morning. This will supposedly start to move my sleep time back, although I'm highly skeptical, strongly believing in better living (and sleeping) through chemistry. The dreams below are the scary results of trying to sleep on my own. That and waking up 4 or 5 times in the night, completely disoriented.


Dreams:

Dream #1: I was in a restaurant, large and dark, many different rooms lit by small jewel-like lamps. There were paintings covering the walls, painted by the owner of the place. They were all of tall buildings, the black skeleton of the building structure stark against the multi-colored backgrounds. There were other subjects to some of the paintings, but the ones of buildings were the most prevalent. I was walking through the restaurant - I was not there to eat - with the owner and I was explaining to him that I had wanted to buy several of the previous paintings he had been exhibiting. He told me they were all gone, but maybe there was something that I would want anyway.

Dream #2: I was at some sort of training class or workshop in which I had to do a presentation in front of the group. I did not take good notes as we were discussing the subject, but figured I could wing it because I'd only be talking to people I worked with. We took a break between sessions and I followed someone back to the place we'd be making the presentations. It turned out that we had to present in front of an audience of about a thousand people who were all taking this class. I was panicked and decided to try to scribble a few things onto PowerPoint slides (despite having learned this week that PowerPoint makes you stupid) before I was called up on stage. I was horrified when I saw that the first team had put together an elaborate presentation and had written a small play about their topic. I kept wondering how much time I had until it was my turn. My laptop was slow to start-up (the one piece of realism in this entire dream) and then the PowerPoint icon had disappeared from the screen when it did start up. I woke up and had to remind myself it was only a dream.

This is what happens when my mind is left to its own devices at night.