I read an article that cited a study that asserted that people that slept more than nine hours a night were subject to more nightmares. I think this study may be found lacking. My personal experience is that when I sleep more than nine hours in a night I remember my dreams better. They are sometimes frustration dreams but seldom what I would call nightmares. How do the authors of the study know that the people that were reporting nightmares when they got over nine hours of sleep weren’t having them when they got less than nine hours of sleep but just were less able to remember what they dreamed.
I find that any change to my sleeping routine has a noticeable effect on the quality of my rest. Not all of these differences are bad. When I sleep longer than my usual seven hours sleep I am definitely more rested to a point. At ten hours I typically start getting restless and wake up.
It also matters whether I have been getting eight hours of sleep consistently for several nights in a row or only six or seven hours. Tiredness seems to be cumulative for me. If I get too little sleep for four or five days in a row, I get drowsy during the day. When I have gotten between eight and nine hours of sleep, I am alert and aware of my environment.
I have wanted to try lucid dreaming, a practice by which you take conscious control of your dream state. I have had little success with it thus far though. The closest that I have come to it though is the time right before I wake up when I’ve had nine or more hours of sleep.
I’ve also had a good bit of success with autosuggestion. I go to sleep thinking about when I want to wake up and I am usually pretty good at waking up right at the time that I had decided that I should wake.
I have often wanted to study hypnotism more closely. I have been hypnotized so I have experiential evidence that the phenomenon is real. I have tried to hypnotize people and found that either I don’t have the requisite tone of voice or none of my subjects took me seriously.
I have also wondered if we didn’t have more influence on things happening in the world around us than is commonly believed. I have plenty of episodic evidence to that effect but none of it s water tight. Unless and until I can repeatably demonstrate the phenomena, I will file it under wishful thinking.
I do believe Arthur C Clark’s third law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is why I make no distinction between Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.