Sleep disturbances

Where do we go when we dream?

I love sleep.

I love my bedroom - so much so that I recently wrote it a love letter, pledging my undying devotion. I love the moment when I get to put the day to rest, go upstairs, change into pajamas, do my evening journaling, and climb into my bed.

It wasn’t always the case. When I was a child, I was afraid of sleeping alone in my bedroom. I was afraid someone was going to silently break the glass of my window and abduct me. I was afraid someone was going to put poison in my cup of bedside water, I was afraid Gene Simmons was hiding in my closet wearing his kitten-crushing boots.

But I never was abducted or poisoned and eventually, I learned to savor the in-between space of night, even when I struggled with difficult sleep.

I come from a family predisposed to sleep disturbances.

My grandmother was one of eight siblings. They shared bedrooms and beds, and they shared dreams. There were times when she and her siblings all woke up screaming, pointing to the same corner of the room, but when my great-grandfather would come running in to investigate, there was nothing there.

Once my grandmother and her sister had the same dream about capturing a frog. When they woke up, they both had the same part of the blanket in their grasp, believing the frog was inside. They had experienced the same dream. So, was it a dream?

Once, my great aunt woke up sitting at her dressing table clutching her neck because she dreamed she’d swallowed her hairbrush.

My grandmother walked and talked in her sleep, sometimes traveling down two flights of stairs to stoke the coal furnace in the basement or wind the grandfather clock in the hall.

My brother was a sleeptalker.

As a young child, he often cried out in his sleep, speaking what sounded like a foreign language. (As an adult, he dreams in Russian so frequently he has begun taking Russian lessons.)

I’m not aware of ever talking or walking in my sleep, but I did dream vividly as a child and have kept dream journals for most of my life. I remember a particularly unnerving repeated dream of being at the bottom of a tall tank of water. In the dream, I was swimming toward the surface but couldn’t not make it. I could feel the pressure in my lungs, the desperate need to breathe, but no matter how hard I swam, I couldn’t reach the top of the tank.

As a child, I had bloody dreams, dreams of flying. I often felt the sensation of falling and would startle myself awake, but the true sleep disturbances started for me around the age of ten or eleven when I began to experience sleep paralysis on a regular basis.

Sleep paralysis the sensation of being conscious but unable to move.

Many people experience, along with sleep paralysis, an hallucination of a figure sitting on top of them. You can find all sorts of sleep paralysis folklore and art depicting an “old hag” - of course sleep demons would be portrayed as an older woman (sigh). In my sleep paralysis, however, I never saw or felt a presence sitting on me. While I did often have the sense that someone or something was in the room looking at me, the struggle was against my own body as I desperately tried to move.

Sleep paralysis for me almost always happened if I slept on my back. I woke up but couldn’t open my eyes or breathe, and I had the sense that I was not in my body. I don’t know how long the sleep paralysis actually lasted, but it felt like an eternity. And it was terrifying.

Although I do still experience it from time to time, this phenomenon thankfully started to taper off for me when I was in my thirties. Interestingly, the last couple of times it happened, I did feel like there was someone or something touching me. I could hear it and feel it. In one instance, I was aware of this presence holding me down. In another, I felt a hand wrapped tightly around my ankle and when I woke up, I could still feel that pressure.

Sleep paralysis is a common sleep disorder, and experiencing the sensation that someone is pulling your soul out of your body or holding you down doesn’t mean these things are actually happening, but I’ll never forget that feeling of the hand gripping my ankle. It was as real as real can be.

Another sleep disturbance I’ve experienced several times in my life is exploding head syndrome - hearing a loud crashing noise inside my head.

Like sleep paralysis, this one happens when I’m in a hypnagogic state. The first time I experienced it, I thought I heard a heavy chest of drawers crashing to the ground. The second time, I thought our bathtub had fallen through the floor. These experiences were visceral, loud, and convincing enough that I got up out of the bed to investigate.

The most recent time I experienced exploding head syndrome, I was in bed, but still awake. I heard a loud glass-shattering crash with no obvious origin.

Nobody knows what causes exploding head syndrome. Some scientists think it could be caused by minor seizures in the brain's temporal lobe, while others suspect it could be the result of stress or anxiety. The latter seems likely, in my case.

But remember, I’m not an either/or person. I believe something can have a scientific explanation as well as a metaphysical one, and whenever I’ve heard the exploding head crashes, I’ve had the sense that I was listening in on another world, or another plane of existence.

Once, I was watching a psychic medium answer questions on Youtube and another viewer asked about this phenomenon. She said that as she was falling asleep she heard a loud crashing sound. The psychic said when you hear a loud crash with breaking glass sounds, it is a portal opening or closing.

I don’t think I have to tell you, I really enjoyed this explanation.

You may not like the idea of portals opening and closing next to your bed, but I…well…I do.

I love dreams in all of their forms. I love dreaming about the future, alternate lives (otherwise known as fantasies,) creative projects. I love lucid dreaming, when I suddenly become aware that I am the dreamer and begin consciously controlling or navigating the dream, and I love mixed-up jumbled weird dreams that make no sense to my conscious mind.

I write down what I remember of my dreams every morning, and often they are like this - a mess of things that seem heavily symbolic, but impossible for me to decipher. I trust the dreaming mind is doing its thing whether I’m able to understand or not.

But every now and then, I dream of something that is clearly guidance.

When I came back to painting after many years away, I engaged in a process for making art that was wholly different from the way I had made art in school. It was an intuitive, spiritual process that began with writing a prayer on my blank canvas then moving paint as a way of opening the painting and allowing whatever wanted to come through to come through. It was oracle painting, in a sense, nothing charted or planned out ahead of time. The completed painting was a surprise to me.

I had been painting this way and sharing my art online for a few months when I had a clear and vivid dream of a conversation. In the dream, someone - a guide, a helper, a voice of authority - said, “You’re going to create medicine paintings for other people. You’ll write their prayers on the canvas.”

I woke up startled. No way was I going to make “medicine paintings” for other people. First of all, the term itself sounded like cultural appropriation. Second, it was scary enough to let people see the work I was creating for myself. Third, who would do this? Who would give me a prayer and trust me to come up with a painting they would like?

But the dream was clear and insistent. Even as I told myself there was no way I was going to do this, I knew there was no way I could avoid it. I trusted what I’d been told and made the offer - with the name Prayer Paintings rather than Medicine Paintings, and much to my surprise, there were people who wanted me to paint for them. And I did paint for them. I did this for years, and it was all because a benevolent voice in my dreams told me to do it.

Most of the time these days, my sleep is a blank unknown place. I sink into it like a stone and rise out of it in the morning as if nothing has happened. I don’t remember what I saw or experienced, who, if anyone, spoke to me.

But I’m currently listening to RuPaul’s memoir and he’s been showing up in my dreams. Just the other day, in the in-between state right before I woke up, I had this thought, “I can visit with people, living or dead, in the dream world.”

That’s a thought I’d like to pursue.

I believe I go somewhere in sleep, even when I don’t remember the trip. I go somewhere and love is there and beings of one sort or another, whisper to me and I whisper back.