Dream Issues Revisited
Remember I was telling y’all how sleeping on my left side makes me have nightmares?
I have this friend named Julio who’s a big science nerd with a degree in mathematics or something, and after he read that entry, he had a science fit and started yelling, “What about symmetry? Why is symmetry so underrated?”
And I said, “What?” And he said, “Why don’t you sleep on your stomach or your back, then, so you’ll be balanced?”
And I said that, first of all, sleeping on your stomach is bad for your neck. At least, it’s bad for mine. Plus, that doesn’t solve the problem as I’m theorizing it. On your stomach, you still have to turn your head to one side or the other. I think the dream differences are caused by increased blood flow to the left half or right half. So… forget that.
Nemesis Vex and others pointed out that, on their left sides, they have more action-oriented dreams. And Nemesis mentioned dreaming of humongus cathedrals. That reminded me that, in the past, I’ve had very awesome architecture-related dreams, featuring intricate indoor swimming pools and gigantic statues decorating downtown. Now that NV has offered his experiment results, I’m thinking those architecture dreams must have been left-side ones.
Luckily for Julio, symmetry, and science, I got heartburn about a week ago, so I had to sleep on my back, propped up on pillows. I had the most harmonious dream ever, about going back to high school. That’s a classic one. But, for the sleeping-side differences I’ve noted, see the chart in Figure 1.
Fig. 1
Right-side dream: I go back to high school and can’t remember where my math class is, so I walk around looking for it half-assedly until I realize that I can’t remember where I parked my car, either.
Left-side dream: I go back to high school and zombies chase me until I turn into a pigeon and fly away.
Sleeping-on-back (symmetrical) dream: I go back to high school and my boyfriend’s there with me and we meet a bunch of really cool people and end up having a picnic in the park. All our classes are electives and we work on drawing really cool comics for the school paper.
Last night we ate pizza, so I had to sleep on my back again. I dreamed that I was a character in a Korean manga. I had blonde hair and my name was something like Soon-Yi Jin and I was being bribed with candy to accompany two older teenagers on their tryst. Very dramatic and exciting. Nothing like boring right- or scary left-side dreams.
The only thing is, sleep-wise, I really hate sleeping on my back. I always put one or both hands behind my head, and they fall asleep.
But that’s enough dream talk for today, I think. No more for a long while, I promise.
