The Cool Side Of The Pillow
Sometimes happiness doesn’t take much. Of course, our happiness might not last very long, but…I have heard the above quote for many years and have used it to give me that momentary happiness.
Scene: a hot night about now and you have finally gotten comfortable to go to sleep. Then, you awaken and feel clammy and realize your pillow is damp. Anderson Cooper said that when this happened to him as a child and he was having trouble going back to sleep, his mother would say turn over your pillow to the cool side of the pillow. He said he would go right back to sleep.
Indeed, it is a simple idea, for some reason it works. Is this the magic potion? Ah, sleep. Shakespeare wrote, “Sleep that soothes away all our worries. Sleep that puts each day to rest. Sleep that relieves the weary laborer heals hurts minds.”
If there is such a thing, an average human spends 33 years sleeping, seven years of those 33 years are really spent trying to go to sleep. That’s 12,045 days, 227,760 hours. Golly, yawn.
Dreaming
Our escape from the day is the gift of dreaming. Experts say dreaming only occurs during a short period of your sleep cycle, 20-25% of your sleep time when REM occurs, rapid eye movement. During this time your brain is most active and you are in a deep, deep sleep. It seems this would be the time when you would dream. Dreams are from your subconscious and normal dreams are mostly about real experiences about people and occurrences that you may have forgotten.
Day dreams occur throughout the day sometimes only a few seconds when we escape reality and think about the past, present or future. Lucid dreams when you are in complete control even though you are “sound to sleep.” False awakening dreams when you feel you are awake, but you are still asleep. Nightmares are for real and the most scary of all when you are helpless to their outcome.
Dreams have always been of great interest. It is amazing how some dream in color and so vivid you can reach out and touch them. Some people have the same dream again and again or at least that is the perception. Humans are machines with an active brain that is always calculating and recalculating, learning from birth to be a human.
If possible we could go back in our history and learn why we do the voluntary things we do such as eating, walking, talking, on and on. Dreaming is involuntary and is a window to some of our darkest recesses, our baggage. As we age our baggage gets heavier and heavier and dreams help us relieve the weight of dragging bad memories into the daylight.
The appreciation for dreams and the interpretation of dreams is found significantly in the Bible. The Pharaoh of Egypt dreamed about seven years of good and seven years of famine. Many dreams and stories in the Bible have the number seven that symbolizes completeness.
Our own dreamer was Walt Disney who dreamed of a place where a family could enjoy the day. His childhood was miserable and during this time he imagined a life very much different from what he lived daily, delivering newspapers in the early morning and late afternoon in the snow, being physically abused by his strict father.
His only outlet was his imagination which eventually led him to his natural talent, art. Growing up on a farm he made friends with the animals, turning them into talking and amusing subjects. His favorite was a pig that he rode around the farm yard, Porker, was an inspiration for the cartoon about the Three Little Pigs.
Sweet dreams and sleep well. Don’t forget the cool side of the pillow.