Posts Tagged ‘healthy sleep’
Sleeping Well
It’s one of those days. I can’t help it. When nothing specific has happened, it’s as if nothing but dreams start bubbling up in my head and flowing out of my fingers onto the keyboard. I suppose it doesn’t help that I gave in to an urge to rewatch the insane Steven Conrad dark-comedy-spy-drama series, “Patriot” last night. A lot of this series is like a bad dream.
Rewatching a much-loved television series is like visiting with old friends you haven’t seen in a long while. It’s why we returned to the beginning of “Reservation Dogs” after finishing the last season. We missed all the characters.
I’m wondering if the spy movie, “Argylle” might have triggered my memories of the “Patriot” series. I understand these shows aren’t for everyone, and I don’t know what my appreciation for them says about me beyond my comfort with dark humor, but they seem to ring some pleasure bells in my head.
Yesterday, I allowed myself to fade into a mid-day slumber in the recliner and dreamed I was floating with a life vest in some water and trying to answer a question Cyndie had asked me from her seat in a low-riding boat. As I attempted to answer I found myself sinking below the surface and I couldn’t do anything about it. My eyes wouldn’t open and my hands and feet wouldn’t move.
I thought to myself, “If I could just open my eyes…” but I couldn’t because I was sleeping at the time. And that is what woke me. My ‘dream self’ began to recognize that my ‘real self’ was asleep. I find moments of lucidity in dreams to be a gift.
Sleeping well enough to enjoy my dreams is also a gift. I do not take for granted my good fortune of having cultivated good sleep habits. I owe a lot of my sleeping success to the information I learned in Matthew Walker’s book, “Why We Sleep – Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.” I highly recommend it!
Since good sleep is one of the more important aspects of optimal health, it is something of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. There is a positive feedback loop in that good health allows for good sleep and getting good sleep is high up on the list of healthy things we can do for ourselves.
If you are out of sync, for either health or sleep, I don’t know if one is solvable before the other. Which comes first?
Don’t bother pondering the question. We can’t lose if we set our sights on striving for both at the same time!
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Different Sleep
A change of perspective is always a valuable experience for me and this weekend up at the lake we have been residing in the old cabin #3 beside the main log house above the water. It is one of the original cabins of the former fishing lodge that Cyndie’s family saved when the Wildwood Association transitioned to families owning individual lots.
The Friswolds moved cabin 3 to a new foundation farther back from the lake to make room for the new log home they had built back in the early 1980s. When our kids were young, we spent most of our time up here in the old cabin, granting people in the big house respite from the clamor of infants waking early and the occasional outbursts of either glee or angst associated with that age.
Currently, there are no young ones of the next generation in the family and cabin 3 gets used less often, primarily as overflow accommodations when attendance numbers swell for a weekend.
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Cyndie and I are really enjoying the throwback to a time when our primary experience up at the lake was from the vantage point of the old, and much smaller cabin.
I have been sleeping deeper than in recent memory and with Asher left back in Beldenville with a sitter for this visit, we have no reasons to rise early. This morning the 8 o’clock hour had arrived before we got up. I had woken early and read the whole paper in bed on my computer and then faded into a morning nap that felt rather decadent.
The small rooms and close proximity to the ground (in the big house we usually sleep in the loft) make it feel like we are almost sleeping outdoors.
The view out the back window is one I relish for the trees and forest floor I’m most attracted to for a natural environment.
It’s as if I’m forest bathing all night long as I sleep.
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Alarming Rise
In one of the many ways I feel lucky, it is my great pleasure to be able to awaken easily when it is time for my alarm to go off. For that matter, I also enjoy the good fortune of falling asleep relatively quickly, without any trouble at all. It was not always so.
During my years of greatest depression symptoms, sleep was problematic for me. Having that for comparison makes my current pattern of blessed slumber that much sweeter.
The radio alarm clock that I have at my bedside has been my companion for decades. It doesn’t get very much interaction from me, so it has grown a little persnickety about responding to button pushes. I fear that the years of dust it has endured have led to some hesitation of electronic connections.
Recently, I have experienced a recurring pattern of waking just before the time that would trigger the radio alarm to come on. One day last week, in exception to that rule, I snoozed a full 6-minutes past the alarm and decided the volume should probably come up a little bit to better get my attention.
I never tested that because the next two days I was up well before the alarm time. Since I am able to leave it off over the weekend, Sunday night I needed to reset everything. It balked over multiple attempts, but eventually I thought I had it.
Whatever song that was on when I tested it in the evening did not prove to be a good reference for the song that was on Monday morning at the appointed hour. Like usual, I had woken up before the alarm, but it being a Monday, I decided I should linger in comfort for the remaining time before the alarm.
It didn’t take me long to fall back asleep, and it didn’t take a second for me to startle awake to the volume of music that came on the short time later.
Oops.
Maybe it’s time to download a fancy newfangled app for my phone to gently increase an alarm until I wake up. I usually am charging the phone at my bedside every night anyway.
I don’t know if I could do that to the old Sony Dream Machine. It’s like family after all these years.
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Relative Something 