And the sounds in the night, they made my ears ring.

[austin_dern]

Apart from the announcement of new plans to remind workers about safety there's nothing new on the Nicoll highway or the Fusionpolis accidents today.

So while falling asleep I heard sharp, clear knocking at my front door. After midnight, that's frightening. I went out and looked around and found ... nothing. Back in bed, I heard a similar rapping at my window. Also similarly, nothing there. I must have been dreaming, or half-dreaming. I've been tired lately. I compounded things by telling someone who'd hurt me awfully some of how I feel even though I knew it wouldn't help either of us feel any better, and that's enough of that. Usually I know better than to sprinkle depression into the world. It just makes it harder for everyone to sleep. I think I need new bedsheets.

Today was a public holiday; I didn't take in any of the insane movie choices as I'm trying to push through a paper and a small project that I just don't like. It's like writer's block. I console myself with the thought that if I can slog through a couple days it'll be done, and none too soon.

I did, though, watch The Sid Caesar Collection, a DVD with not nearly enough sketches from Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour and one from The Admiral Broadway Revue. The sketches are accompanied with comments from some of the writers and performers and it's just gut-wrenchingly funny. Good high point for the day, and gasping for air because something's just that funny makes everything feel better.

Trivia: Irene Adler, who to Sherlock Holmes was always the woman, was from New Jersey. Source: A Scandal In Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Currently Reading: The Second World War, John Keegan.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Auditory hallucinations while falling asleep are pretty common. I get them from time to time myself, although distressingly they are often paired with sleep paralysis in my case.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You get sleep paralysis? I've never -- so far as I remember -- had it.

What I really want to experience sometime is lucid dreaming, but I have a hard enough time remembering my dreams, much less directing them.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I started getting sleep paralysis episodes -- the term I originally learned for it is "incubus attacks" -- in college. Since then it has happened rather intermittently. Sometimes it seems that months or years go by without me having any, but lately I have been having them a lot. Sometimes it will happen several times in a night, usually in what is presumably quick succession (although the sense of time gets rather distorted). I had one just a little while ago while I was napping on the couch, actually, but it was mild.

The worst I ever had was actually accompanied by a visual hallucination of a tall figure standing over my bed, which obviously was terrifying. I very much hope that never happens again. Unfortunately, once you start getting them, you probably always will. Something is misfiring in my sleep cycles and I just have to live with it. Luckily I don't usually get the visual aspect and I never get the chest-crushing feeling a lot of sufferers get.

I have dreamed "lucidly" quite often, but only in the sense that I knew I was dreaming; it didn't allow me to control the dreams much. Sometimes I don't even fully realize the implications of the fact that I am dreaming, even though in some sense I know that I am. For instance, I once dreamed that I was on a roller coaster and I had a feeling it was going to derail at the turn. I knew I wasn't going to be hurt since it was a dream, but I felt sorry for the other people in the roller coaster, so I turned around and said, "It's going to derail, but don't worry, it's only a dream so you won't be hurt."

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's a terrifying sleep paralysis experience. I'm fortunate in that (and many other) regard(s); the worst I have is occasional difficulty sleeping.

There's a few times now and then that I've been aware I was dreaming, and that helped make it a more fun experience even if something properly terrifying was going on (see my dream about the end of the world, several weeks back), but that knowledge never encouraged me to take advantage of dream potentials. I suppose it's silly to want to somehow make use of dreams, but I would at least like the experience.