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So, anyway, I've discovered something about myself: I can function with relatively little actual deep sleep, if I'm allowed a long, extended, time devoted to a state of half-dreaming/half-waking. I can get by with as little as five hours full sleep, as long as I have that "buffer zone" to drift in and out of dreaming, gradually leaving one realm, and thinking on it as I enter the next. Eight hours of full sleep are better than five, but not if that means I have to get up right away and hurry about (and thereby forget my dreams). Rushing into wakefulness, even after the "recommended eight hours," tends to give me a migraine.
Since I was planning to leave the house this morning at 11:00a to go to the library. So I set my radio to turn on at 7:00a, knowing that I could drift in and out of sleep quite comfortably with NPR's reporters' voices in my ear (and my radio "auto alarm" turns itself off in an 1hr, 59mins, which gives me two hours for breakfast and dressing).
Cue 7a, and the strange dream:
I dreamt that while I was listening to NPR's Morning Edition with my left ear, I was hearing an an entirely different radio show in my right ear -- inside the ear, like "ringing in the ear," but with actual voices (only, in my dream, I was calling my left "right" and my right "left").
The "phantom radio show" was the antithesis of NPR: one of those Goofy FM radio "Morning shows" with sophomoric sound effects, fart jokes, recorded laugh tracks and a sarcastic disk jockey. And get this: the disk jockey was Satan, and the radio broadcast was originating in Hell. In my dream, I knew that the Goofy FM Show was not real, and probably just the result of a pinched nerve, or something. But I was still annoyed by it, because I was trying to listen to NPR, and I was trying to figure out how to shut it up.
So anyway, as I was dealing with this annoyance, I was sitting at a bar-like table (a long board on brackets in a wall) in a sort of gardening shed/workshoppy place, with flowerpots and gardening shed tools spread out on the table around me (along with the transistor radio on which NPR was playing, and bright sunlight shinging through cracks in the boards. And I was having breakfast.
So who should come up and sit down to have breakfast with me but the voice artist, Fred Newman;* he doesn't doesn't do any sound effects or anything, but I complain to him about the phantom radio show.
...I drift in and out of sleep, and the dream switches to several new scenes. A key one is this (it may have been the last one before I was fully awake):
I'm riding in the front seat of Fred's car (he's driving me around to do errands), and NPR is playing on the car radio (and 'Satan' is still ranting in my ear). We pull into a store parking lot, and as I get ready to get out of the car, I notice that there's a small woman standing there, staring at me (us), and I think: "Oh, Great! Another Pity Junkie!"** and, at first I decide to try and ignore her. Then, I realize she's trying to ask me something, to ask my advice about something. But she doesn't have a very strong voice, and I can't hear her over the two radio shows going simultaneously. I can't turn off the show inside my ear, so I try to at least turn off the car radio.
...And, all of a sudden the inside of the car becomes cluttered with brand new tubes of lipstick: reds, maroons and purples, mostly. And glitter lipstick, at that. And the tubes of lipstick get in my way, and I can't reach (or even find) the radio control buttons.
...
Um, yeah. I get that Satan's Morning Radio Madness was my dream!brain's way of playing with what I was actually hearing from the outside world. I get that the tiny woman who can't make herself heard is probably an expression of my own frustration at being "stuck" right now. And Fred Newman as a Guide/Aide figure kinda makes sense, as his whole career has been about using his voice, (and he has a song on Between the Lions called "Get your mouth moving")...
But glitter lipstick?! Really?! WTF, Subconscious?
*(Here's 14 seconds of an audio-visual aid from YouTube, in case you have no idea who Fred Newman is).
**"Pity Junkie" is a term that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
haddayr posted in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
gimp_vent, last night, to refer to those who seem to throw themselves in the pity puddle for a good wallow every time they see someone else with something "wrong" with them.
Since I was planning to leave the house this morning at 11:00a to go to the library. So I set my radio to turn on at 7:00a, knowing that I could drift in and out of sleep quite comfortably with NPR's reporters' voices in my ear (and my radio "auto alarm" turns itself off in an 1hr, 59mins, which gives me two hours for breakfast and dressing).
Cue 7a, and the strange dream:
I dreamt that while I was listening to NPR's Morning Edition with my left ear, I was hearing an an entirely different radio show in my right ear -- inside the ear, like "ringing in the ear," but with actual voices (only, in my dream, I was calling my left "right" and my right "left").
The "phantom radio show" was the antithesis of NPR: one of those Goofy FM radio "Morning shows" with sophomoric sound effects, fart jokes, recorded laugh tracks and a sarcastic disk jockey. And get this: the disk jockey was Satan, and the radio broadcast was originating in Hell. In my dream, I knew that the Goofy FM Show was not real, and probably just the result of a pinched nerve, or something. But I was still annoyed by it, because I was trying to listen to NPR, and I was trying to figure out how to shut it up.
So anyway, as I was dealing with this annoyance, I was sitting at a bar-like table (a long board on brackets in a wall) in a sort of gardening shed/workshoppy place, with flowerpots and gardening shed tools spread out on the table around me (along with the transistor radio on which NPR was playing, and bright sunlight shinging through cracks in the boards. And I was having breakfast.
So who should come up and sit down to have breakfast with me but the voice artist, Fred Newman;* he doesn't doesn't do any sound effects or anything, but I complain to him about the phantom radio show.
...I drift in and out of sleep, and the dream switches to several new scenes. A key one is this (it may have been the last one before I was fully awake):
I'm riding in the front seat of Fred's car (he's driving me around to do errands), and NPR is playing on the car radio (and 'Satan' is still ranting in my ear). We pull into a store parking lot, and as I get ready to get out of the car, I notice that there's a small woman standing there, staring at me (us), and I think: "Oh, Great! Another Pity Junkie!"** and, at first I decide to try and ignore her. Then, I realize she's trying to ask me something, to ask my advice about something. But she doesn't have a very strong voice, and I can't hear her over the two radio shows going simultaneously. I can't turn off the show inside my ear, so I try to at least turn off the car radio.
...And, all of a sudden the inside of the car becomes cluttered with brand new tubes of lipstick: reds, maroons and purples, mostly. And glitter lipstick, at that. And the tubes of lipstick get in my way, and I can't reach (or even find) the radio control buttons.
...
Um, yeah. I get that Satan's Morning Radio Madness was my dream!brain's way of playing with what I was actually hearing from the outside world. I get that the tiny woman who can't make herself heard is probably an expression of my own frustration at being "stuck" right now. And Fred Newman as a Guide/Aide figure kinda makes sense, as his whole career has been about using his voice, (and he has a song on Between the Lions called "Get your mouth moving")...
But glitter lipstick?! Really?! WTF, Subconscious?
*(Here's 14 seconds of an audio-visual aid from YouTube, in case you have no idea who Fred Newman is).
**"Pity Junkie" is a term that
haddayr posted in gimp_vent, last night, to refer to those who seem to throw themselves in the pity puddle for a good wallow every time they see someone else with something "wrong" with them.
