Vivid Dreams

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That reminds me of Alice In Wonderland where Alice (in her dream) tries to recite poetry but the words keep coming out strangely, though it's not quite the same thing.

Actually it does make a little sense. After my stroke, I lost all my words. It is extremely hard to communicate without words. I fought very hard and was able to get some of my communication ability back. But some of my words I lost forever and some came back in an opposite direction. For almost 6 months, I went around calling my dog a cat and calling my cat a dog. It was embarrassing.

Two Brains are Better Then One (Round 2)

I had been sick for several days and found it difficult to breath. I theorized, in my REM dream state, that Alka Seltzer would provide some relief. I was wrong. It gave me a little bit of relief for a couple hours but then came back with a vengeance. So after one day of experimentation, I decided this was a lost cause.

It turns out that another bit of medicine provide some relieve. It was Vicks VaperRub. A little bit under my nose and on my neck provided some benefits. Now I am on the mends.

Yes I've been aware of a sense of disability in some of my dreams since I was in my 20s.

After my stroke, I suffered a severe form of Aphasia. I lost my ability to speak. At the same time I also lost my ability to read. I lost my words and it is hard to communicate without your words. It is similar to what the actor Bruce Willis has experienced recently. The strange thing was that I never lost my ability to write, just my ability to read. The main problem was that I couldn't read what I had written at the beginning of my recovery. Here is a video of the effect of this condition.

Interesting video. Surprising how many people can at least partially recover. I suppose the lesion itself doesn't heal but the brain somehow reprograms other areas to take on the "new" skills, i.e. the results of the exercises.

One thing I sometimes experience when a dream has become lucid, is paralysis. It was scary when it first happened. Apparently it's normal. The paralysis is the reason why people don't act out their dreams, which could be dangerous of course. The only difference in my case is that I become aware of the paralysis.

One way to cope is to simply accept it and let the dream continue. I've done that once or twice, and I've woken up not long afterwards. For all I know, I may have done it many more times but stayed asleep so long that I've forgotten about it by the time I wake up.

The other way I cope, if the experience is too scary, is to wake myself up. The only method I know for doing that is to focus on my breathing, which of course isn't paralysed or I wouldn't be here now. Breathing has an unconscious "driving force" behind it, and also a conscious one, so I try to make the conscious force take over, then I can start breathing deeper until I can make a noise, and the sound of that wakes me.

When I first started doing that, I would always have a vivid visual "hypnopompic hallucination" on waking if I kept my eyes closed. Unfortunately, they don't happen much any more. I suppose the reason why they used to happen was that I'd rapidly woken out of the dream state and whatever mechanism causes the visual part of dreams must have still been working for a minute or two afterwards. But I don't know why it hasn't done that recently.

During REM sleep your legs and arms become unmovable (a type of paralysis). Otherwise there is a good chance that during a vivid dream you could seriously injure yourself.



As we age, our bodies are not what they use to be. For many people our sleep state becomes very affected. Many elderly people do not experience any measurable amount of REM and deep NREM sleep. They only sleep very lightly and any noise or sound immediately wakes them up.

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I guess it's one more downside of getting old. Luckily, I still have "proper" dreams, and some of them are reasonably vivid, so my REM abilities aren't completely finished yet. I'm still hoping to get another hypnopompic hallucination, though it might never happen.

Some scientists think ancient humans slept in trees, which would have put more selective pressure on them to be paralysed. But it's a thing I've seen in dreaming dogs also. I've seen their rapid eye movements behind their closed eyelids, and at the same time they commonly move their limbs slightly but they don't move them very far, as if they're mostly paralysed. Of course dogs have very little ability to climb trees. So I guess spending time in trees isn't the deciding factor.

According to the Internet:

Sometimes, hypnagogic hallucinations happen along with a state of sleep paralysis. In sleep paralysis, the muscles in your body will be immobile, and you won’t be able to move. The combination of immobility and hallucinations can be frightening. It can last for up to several minutes before your muscles return to normal.

The movement in hypnic jerks is an involuntary muscle spasm called myoclonus. Hiccups are another form of myoclonus muscle spasm. Not all hypnic movements will wake you up the way a sleep start will. Sometimes, the movements will be small twitches that you won’t notice.

The possibility that this feature derived from animals that sleep in trees is an interesting concept. Chimpanzees and other primates sleep in trees, using branches as a bed. So it makes sense that this characteristic began very early in prehistoric man.

From my perspective it is possible to be in both REM sleep and awake simultaneously. It is very hard to do. But I have done it several times. It is wild to communicate with your other brain in this phase. You can toss a thought or a question at it and it goes off racing to analyze.

Very interesting.

I heard that somebody did a rather cruel experiment where they cut a nerve in a cat's brain, and when it dreamed, it ran about chasing something - perhaps imaginary mice. But the story could have been a myth.

That last bit reminds me of the autistic mind, or at least my autistic mind.

I've never experienced what you did though. I just used to get a hypnopompic hallucination on waking suddenly from a dream. I felt fully awake and normal at the time. When they were trying to happen frequently, I was initially scared of them so I would turn on a light and keep my eyes open until I thought it was safe to go back to sleep. But on one night, after I'd had my eyes open for a few seconds, my growing curiosity about the matter exceeded my fear, and I closed my eyes, and the result was a very vivid hallucination. After that I never had one quite so vivid. I've wondered since whether the brief exposure to light helped to intensify the effect.

A couple nights ago, I had another vivid dream.
I was sick last week and it had a devastating affect on my sleep cycle. My REM sleep went very close to zero.

Sunday -- 23 minutes REM
Tuesday -- 11 minutes of REM
Wednesday -- 16 minutes of REM

But then I began to recover. On Saturday night I experienced another vivid dream.
Deep NREM sleep -- 1 hour, 36 minutes
REM sleep -- 1 hour, 31 minutes.

There is a lot of chaos in the world today. My dream was focused on fixing the chaos. The problem is not simple but consist of layers. At least one layer is hidden. Wars are being fought and at various levels by many bad actors. Somehow I came up with brain splicing as a solution.