A lot of people say they don’t remember their dreams, but I vividly remember my dreams in minute detail, thanks to a sleep disorder called Alpha Wave Interrupted Sleep. Suddenly coming awake fully alert during a REM sequence for me is like screen snipping an HD DVD playing in my laptop, it freezes the action and impresses it like a video onto my brain, with the perk of being able to roll it back and forth through the action because brains are better screen snippers than laptop hard drives are.
My diagnosis was a little too spectacular, literally being booted out of a sleep clinic a few years ago for not sleeping, but thankfully the 4 hours I did spend there were productive enough to be told later in a doctor’s office that I have some pretty solid alpha-delta wave crashes. The lab tech was a little cranky, something about sleeping only 20 minutes and wasting their time, but that was probably exaggerated. Wonder what it does to their brain waves to sit and stare at a monitor expectantly waiting for something to happen with my brain waves. I could never get through a job like that, I’d go mental in a week flat.
At any rate, I’m living proof that sleep deprivation doesn’t necessarily kill you or make you crazy (my siblings mock that part), having been like this all of my life, but the remembering the dreams part sure makes it more interesting. O_O Like popping awake to this one today. Some radio jock was yapping catchy “Listen Live” commentary behind what was like watching a TV movie and being in it at the same time. Creepy and spooky are good words for coming home to things being moved around, sometimes shattered or thrown across the floors, new items showing up, discovering doors being unlocked upon arriving home, signs of violence and possibly death but too much missing evidence to conclude what happened. And then waking up to stuff having happened while we were asleep. And then discovering a disturbed nephew had moved his vagrant self into our house behind our backs and seemed to think he owned the place now, and realizing it was clearly a matter of time before we would be executed and cleared out as junk after police discovered another house where that had already happened. I was up to the point in the dream where Scott and I were planning our escape in two different vehicles kind of blocked in the driveway (btw, this wasn’t my real house at all, I have no idea where all this new stuff comes from in my head, because my own driveway would have been ridiculously easy to get out of), and I was terrified that I’d left my phone behind and wouldn’t be able to contact Scott because he evidently hadn’t escaped behind me…. The sudden waking up part made the running “Listen Live” commentary more prominent and it kept playing for about a minute while I boinged out of bed to get coffee.
The neat part of sleep deprivation and remembering your dreams is getting to figure out what inspired the dreams, like having an inbuilt daily puzzle to solve. They say dreams help us build neural pathways (my brain must be *packed*) and organize information. The content doesn’t seem to be that important, but I can usually pinpoint where the bits and pieces come from. Last night’s dream’s inspirations came from a local murder-suicide event (people we sort of knew), my penchant for listening to internet radio and podcasts, and skimming through The Walking Dead preshow warm up and live tweet commentary in my twitter feed in the wee hours between the tossing and turning. I know it doesn’t come from watching the zombie shows themselves, as you can imagine, I avoid live tense drama shows (especially with mutilation and blood) because my nightmares already get pretty horrific as it is, and remembering them as vividly as I do makes me feel pretty ill, really don’t need outside prompts triggering more images, although the stuff I come up with in my dreams seems to far outstrip anything I’ve ever seen on television. (I disturbed my psychologist with one in particular that prompted a discussion on becoming the next Stephen King, perhaps.) Point is, I LOVE spoilers because they dissipate that kind of tension and I don’t watch the shows anyway, so radio is my first choice for anything zombie.
This pic clicks to that feed list I mentioned.
I’ve been making private zombie jokes about older relatives and especially ever since Scott revealed his zombie escape plan to me about 15 months ago during a scary bout of heat exhaustion prompted vasculitis and mega meds, and of course, Scott is a devoted Walking Dead fan, so I get reports on his water cooler yap from work all the time. I also get some pretty hilarious blow by blow commentary on the We’re Alive podcast along with Walking Dead stuff from SnarkAlec Radio. Actually, that’s why I listen to podcast/internet radio commentary, because it’s so funny I can’t help listening, and between that and twitter I think probably beats watching the shows myself anyway. I’m able to keep up with the TV fandoms in great shape, only sacrificing actual watch time, plus I get a whole new set of real time interaction that beats watching Talking Dead because it’s more personally touchable via live tweet, whereas Talking Dead is just a specialized talk show. Don’t get me wrong, me and Chris Hardwick go way back, but admiring from afar doesn’t hold a cool scented candle to being able to interact in real time with a whole group of hard core zombie addicts on the SnarkAlecs Radio show on the Loud N’ Loaded station. These pictures click to the recorded shows on Tony Solo’s YouTube channel.
Tony Solo holding up a dried up ‘wound’ that fell off the previous week during the Halloween show and petrified.
From the Halloween show
And if you’d rather watch gurlz doing zombie talk there is Bring Out Your Geek, with back videos at Yeung Jeans’s Videos on Vimeo, and more likely to add in the finer points of Doctor Who, pinterest, Quinto… you know, the good stuff. This pic clicks to the webishow page.
Arch Heretic 
What a weird disorder…
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