i’m not kidding when i say i’m a restless sleeper. the sheet-mattress clamps are real and even with them it’s only a matter of time before sheets are kicked off the bed. it’s been this way for me since i was a child and it hasn’t gotten better as i’ve gotten older.

i have a misfit shine (and previously a jawbone up wristband) that can track my sleep patterns. i’m not really sure how accurate these little bits of technology are at measuring the quality of my nightly rest. my shine tells me that even on those nights when the time between i go to bed and the time when i get up is eight hours or more, i never get more than three or four hours of “restful sleep”. by tracking my movement it seems to be telling me that even when i’m asleep, i still don’t seem to be getting a lot of rest.

to get a solid eight hours of restful sleep, it seems i’d have to have about 15 hours, give or take, every night to devote to sleeping. that doesn’t seem very efficient and is unlikely to happen.

i have contemplated visiting a sleep clinic. at my next regularly scheduled check up, i do plan on talking to my doctor about this stuff. or, at a minimum, ask him how accurate he thinks these little sleep trackers, like my misfit, are at calculating my quality and duration of sleep.

and maybe i’m off and most people don’t wake up every morning remembering their dreams, but i’ve always had the impression that most people do have, at least, a sense that they dream.

i don’t have that sense. not regularly. there are very rare mornings, i’d say easily less than once a month, when i wake up and have a sense that i dreamt the night before. its even more rare that i actually remember anything about a dream i had.

descriptively, the asteroid dream is pretty straight forward and i don’t think i need to say anything more about it.

the other dream(s) is much harder to verbalize, put into words.

what i can say is this; in much the same way the asteroid, house, and backyard in the other dream were always exactly the same, so was, at least for a long time, the girl in my dreams. in the most obvious, literal sense, it was the girl of my dreams, which was kind of nice. however, what i think i used to find the most frustrating, and intriguing, was that the girl didn’t look like anyone i knew in my waking life.

the girl in the most recent iterations is different from those dreams when i was younger. looking back, there’s a part of me that thinks the dream girl from the earliest versions bore a striking resemblance to katie, though i can’t be sure (and it would be equal parts depressing and unbelievable) and instead tell myself that it’s simply the romantic and wishful part of my brain that makes the comparison (i don’t think the earlier dream girl versions were red-headed).

these love-longing-inspired dreams have become both less frequent and less jarring as i’ve gotten older. i chalk this up to not being quite so enamored by the idea of reckless true love and that i don’t look to being coupled as my only chance for happiness (all things being equal, i like my life now). still, even now, I can’t wake up from one of these types of dreams without being a little shaken, a little unsettled. the main difference now is this; in the past these dreams would leave me all but useless, unable to do much other than sit and wallow. now, they may darken my mood and my outlook, but cannot distract me from more purposeful endeavors.

ahh, what a difference therapy can make.