Dreaming and Waking

I didn't sleep too well last night: I had accidentally fell asleep early - at 9 pm - after having a dinner of Chinese food with red wine with my colleagues at Jalan Batu Ceper; and then I woke up at 2.00 am in the morning. I could not sleep again after that. I had dreamt of meeting old friends and interesting strangers. My memory of it is vague but the overall feeling was pleasant.

We normally dream every night but forget about them when we wake up. Some people keep a dream diary, recording their dreams immediately upon waking. It is an interesting practice but I myself do not keep a "dreamblog" as such. There is a phase in our sleep called REM or Rapid Eye Movement when dreaming occurs. During this stage in our sleep, our eyelids remain shut but our eyeballs are somehow active and moving, as if we are seeing, responding and reacting in a waking state. If we are awakened during REM sleep, we would be able to recall our dreams quite well.

I have been reading a book by Steven Strogatz called Sync. In a chapter on our daily sleep cycle, he likened the REM dream state to a car parked in a garage, with the gears put to neutral and the accelerator pedal down. Our minds are actually at a very active state during REM sleep even though we do not twitch a single muscle during the entire sequence. Dreams have always been seen as windows into our subconscious. Sigmund Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams is considered a classic of psychology.

While I was lying restlessly awake in bed early this morning, I surfed the channels on my TV and immediately caught Jennifer Lopez's The Cell on HBO. I had seen this visually arresting movie when I was in Singapore maybe two years ago. The Cell is the first full feature work of video director Tarsem Singh who directed music videos for the the pop group R.E.M. before (Coincidence?). The movie is about plugging into the mind of a serial killer who is already in comatose to find out the whereabouts of one of his victims who is about to die. Jennifer Lopez plays a researcher who uses high-tech technology that allows someone to enter into the subconscious mind of another.

The Cell shows the subconscious as something out of Salvador Dali's paintings. We see luscious Jennifer Lopez, clad in dazzling opera-like costumes being propelled into the surrealistic settings of the killer's mind. Watching the movie on TV made me feel dreamy again. And as the hours progressed I was lost in the nether-land between dreaming and waking.

I woke up not feeling very well rested. Perhaps I'll catch a wink or two later. But I need to finish off some work today - I need to be fresh and alert. Dreams are achieved through hardwork......