Of melatonin and dreaming

Hours slept last night: almost 9,5
General feeling: I want to sleep even more!

One interesting phenomenon I've (probably) mentioned before, is that since I began to experiment with melatonin, my dreaming quality has improved along with sleeping. First I thought it as a bad thing, because I've understood from all the different sleep research papers I've occasionally read, that if you dream a lot, you don't really get any rest. On the other hand, some people just remember their dreams better than others. I've usually leant on the first theory, because I've dreamed a lot since I was a child, but the most refreshing nights hardly ever include any dreaming. The highish amount of dreaming in my life has probably contributed to the alien feeling I've had since being a teenager and most of my adult age. It's very similar to the feeling they described in Matrix in 1999 or last year in Inception. You feel like you've done a lot, but the morning and the day that follows feels strange and incomplete.

This long explanation connects to my use of melatonin, because once I switched to it and refused to try any more any other drugs (not that there were THAT many, I'm just really bad in taking any kind of drugs), my Dreams came back. The capital D is there because the past 3 to 4 years (that's really an estimate, it's been a blur) proper dreams, with long narratives and sometimes continuing from one night to another, have been scarce. My life has been dominated with the thought of not-getting-enough-sleep, not being able to fall asleep, waking up in the middle of the night, waking up too early in the morning, getting by with 4 hour sleep nights for long periods of time. I remember that the first time I went to see a doctor about it, I was only able to cry. When he told me to go home and sleep (it was Monday afternoon), I did go home, but didn't fall sleep before nightfall. I remember lying in my bed, thinking: this is it, this is how madness begins.

I'm glad it didn't. But first with the drug I tried back then, I wasn't able to dream either. At all. My sleep was deep, almost too much, but I didn't experience any stories. It was like losing another world, again (first time being when the insomniac symptoms began). The first narrative dream I remember from my childhood was partly nightmare, but it did continue from one night to another and as I crew older, I learned to control it, and actually dreamed a happy ending for the whole thing. So I know it's possible and even if today I have nightmares, I know there's help close by, because I'm there myself.

So now those stories are back. They were given back to me. Or maybe they have been there all the time, but it's melatonin, the natural drug of my body, that rises them to my consciousness and makes me remember them. The past two nights I've taken melatonin, and last night I had one of the best rides of my life. I won't get into details, but it was an agent dream, the best and most real ones always are. It's funny that my subconscious has chosen the genre that I'm so critical towards to in real life. It's like I'm trying to construct a perfect agent/action/thriller narrative in my mind by living through different variations. Or maybe it's been about chasing that perfect Sleep all along.

P.S. Thanks Clive for the good company last night. We made a pretty good team, didn't we ? (The series of BMW commercials from the first years of 2000's aren't bad either. This one, Ambush from The Hire series was directed by the late John Frankenheimer.)