Do you love to sleep? Do you usually have good dreams or bad? Have you ever had a sleep disorder? What's your favorite thing about sleep?

I absolutely love that hazy time in the morning when you get to sleep in as long as you want and you aren't sure if you're going to get up yet and you just cuddle with the cat or your boy and everything is really quiet and still in the house.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

Answers

*sigh* I have a sleep disorder at the moment -- off and on since college (the past five years or so) I have had bouts of insonia. It's really hard to deal with; I go to bed, can't sleep, the next night I get anxious about whether I will be able to sleep or not, and so can't sleep, repeat cycle over and over...Once I DO fall asleep, it's all good. I rarely remember dreaming, when I do it's very surreal and nonsensical and amusing. My cat only sleeps with me when it's cold, and then she curls up under my arm like a little teddy bear and puts her paws in my hand. Aaaawwww....

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

my dreams are usually absurd. things like me having a black baby and when I pick it up, it's a picture on the TV guide. No food for me before bed time.

I love to sleep though. as a matter of fact, I called in sick yesterday and spent the whole day in bed. :)

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

oooooooo i love sleeping. i really really love it. i mean i especially like that warm soft fuzzy feeling as you're just slipping away or when you're just waking up. i nap constantly. sleeping is just wonderful. there's this movie... i forget what it's called - sleep train or something? it's set in Memphis and it's a set of three stories told one after the other - and they're all connected somehow. anyway, in one of these little bits, is a ultra-hip japanese teen couple and there's a scene where they're in bed, and the girl doesn't want to wak up, and the guy keeps bugging her saying she's going to sleep her life away - and she says "i like to sleep - when i die, i won't be able to sleep and that means i won't be able to dream." and that's what i use now if anyone is bugging me.

although my dreams are generally wacked out and impossible to understand, they're always interesting.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

I love sleeping. It's one of my favorite things. I don't usually remember my dreams but when I do they usually contain a large rabbit with a magic hat and a house full of waterbeds.

As a child I suffered from sleep apnea. That's where you stop breathing in your sleep. My poor mother. There was a period of time where she never got a full night's sleep because she was always listening for me to stop breathing so she could run in and wake me up. I also would laugh in my sleep when I was a kid. Laugh hysterically. I was a strange child.

I am now very into naps right when I get home after work. I lay on the floor with the cat and we nap. It's very pleasant. At night my husband, our cat and I all snuggle into bed. It's the nicest way to sleep---three bugs, snug in a rug.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

I'm a teenager. I .love. to sleep. However, I'm a little disgruntled by the fact that I'm going to be spending at least a third of my life doing it. Damn. Think of how many grapes I could peel with 8 extra hours in my day.

My dreams are pretty funky. They usually involve people from real life, or sometimes I have this reoccuring dream that I'm sitting on a grassy knole, and I'm eating marshmellows that grow on vines, and they're shaped like H's. I really like this dream, but that hike up the knole is so exhausting...

I had a dream once I was Batman. Not even Batwoman, but Batman. And I was animated. Too bad it didn't occur to me to take a sneaky peaky.

Last night, I had a dream that a nurse was berating me for not taking my amoxocilin. She had dark hair; I suppose she's probably a figment of some buried memory.

My dreams can be pretty messed up. My theory is that I'm really crazy, except I manage to hide it in daily life, mostly. Except when I dream, my mind can get away with all this nutty shit. One time, my friends had a real old dog they were going to put to sleep. It wouldn't eat, and they could hardly get it to drink water. I had a dream that they had decided that running it over was cheaper, and they separated its head from it's body. I remember looking at it and thinking, "Gee, I'd better act really appalled." So I said, "Ai! Dios mio!" Spanish--and I wasn't even that shocked or anything. This makes me kind of frightened, like one of these days I could get all confused with this id-ego-superego struggle and the socially unacceptable side could win.

One of my favorite dreams was that I was some kind of scantily-clad barbarian being chased by Skeletor and all his minions. They kept on hurtling spears at me. I pushed Skeletor off the cliff and ran off, but I could hear him cursing and struggling to get me. I think I may have died.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

I dreamed the other night that my husband and I were living in our own garage, and that we had a baby (we don't). Charlie was organizing his tools, and had his back to me, and through the whole dream I just kept changing the baby's diapers (on the hood of my car, which apparently lived in the garage with us), or cleaning up its barf. I kept yelling, "I'm sick of changing diapers and cleaning puke!" but Charlie wouldn't turn around.

I LOVE to sleep. I live for Saturday mornings when birds singing and sunshine through the windows wakes me, instead of a little glowing box that goes "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" like a truck backing up. All week long when my alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m.(an hour early so I can hit the snooze button 6.666 times) I make little deals with myself. "Lisa, time to get up." "No." (snuggle deeper into covers) "OK Lisa, if you just go ahead and get up now, I promise I will put you back in bed as soon as possible." "No. You lie!" (heart rate is starting to increase) "But I promise, this time it's true." "You really promise? Because last time you said that, you tricked me, and I wasn't back in bed until, like, 1:00 a.m." (chin wobbles, near tears) "I know, and I'm sorry. Tonight you can go back to bed as soon as you get home from work. All you have to do is throw down your purse, run up the stairs and do a belly flop onto the bed. You don't even have to take off your makeup first if you don't want." "Really?!? You're usually so anal about that!" (eyes start to open) "I know. Now come on and get up." "No." (eyes slam shut tight) I can't even fool myself anymore.

The bed is simply too comfortable, and I am simply too lazy. Hitting snooze allows me a gradual wake-up, and I also set the clock fast so I am forced to do a little math. (Ok, it says 5:55, which means it must really be 5:38, so I actually have 22 more minutes. I can get up at 6:17, and it will really be 6:00...snore) Yeah, math in the morning wakes me right up. Oh, and my husband doesn't get up until 7:15, which pisses me off. How am I supposed to get up when he's so snuggly next to me, and my kitty is laying by my neck? I wish I could call in tired to work. Or lazy. Or warm kitty. "Yes, that's right. I won't be coming in because my cat is especially warm and cute on my bed right now. I simply must stay here. See you tomorrow!" I wouldn't even have to do any little fake coughs, or use my 'so weak that I must be dying' voice.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

I love to sleep even with my bad sleep disorder. I do get Ambien on occasion and I highly recommend it to anyone with insomnia but you have to be very very careful because it's a hypnotic. Anyway I love to have nightmares, the kind that you wake up all shaky and scared. I have a lot of lucid dreams where I tell myself it's just a dream so if you get hurt or caught or whatever it will be OK. Works out real well. I have dreamt about Trace Adkins but it was just about his wife inviting me and my fiance over for dinner. My Brett Favre dream is of us holding hands walking across Lambeau Field. Gah! I can't cheat on my boyfriend even in my dreams!

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

Sleeping is my most favorite thing!!!!

I dated a guy once who had a very annoying habit of automatically waking up at 6:00 every morning. Instead of letting me sleep, he would start hugging me and cuddling me until I woke up. AT SIX O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING! I would wake up screaming obscenities and threatening to kill him but he would just laugh, he had the nerve to think I was just joking. I confronted him on it one night and he gave me all this crap about his internal clock and how he just couldn't stand to let me sleep when I looked so beautiful. Whatever! So I told him that if he ever woke me up again it was over!! The next day, you guessed it!! SIX O'CLOCK! I told him to get out and I refused to see him after that. A month later I got a poem from him in the mail. It was titled "Grumpy Morning Girl". Luckily my husband and I have almost the exact same sleep style. When we got married we went to Home Depot and bought one of those huge turbo fans. We have to glue ourselves to the bed to keep from blowing away, but it does drown out all the noise outside our apartment.

My favorite is Sunday! We will sleep in and then go to breakfast. When we get back we go back to bed for another couple of hours. That cuddling is always the best. Yum.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

i love to sleep. unfortunately, i work in a bakery and often get up for the day at 4 am, which means i miss all the good night-stuff by going to bed at 7 pm.

my favorite kind of sleeping is the sleeping in a very small dorm bed with your significant other. where you have to share one pillow and he snores and steals the covers and you talk in your sleep, but you know that when you wake up, he's going to be six inches from you. that's the best kind.

i miss sleeping (really actually sleeping, you sick people!) with other people.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

I love dreaming. Lately I haven't had any, or I just don't remember having any.

As I am a lucid dreamer, my favorite dreams are nightmares where something big and ugly is chasing me, but instead of thinking "Everything's ok" like Amy, I take it one step further. I get medevial on it's (whatever monster thing is trying to kill me) ass!

In my dreams, I turn into the biggest transformer, ninja, mahcine gun totin' (I mean like the kind that Jessie (then) "The Body" Ventura had in Predator), rocket launcher carrying, mushroom cloud layin, titanium claw havin (ala' Wolverine), laser from the eye shootin, super hero.

I love the look on the monsters face when he's chasing me, and then I realize this is just a dream. I start laughing and morphing (oh yeah, I didn't mention that I get 500ft. tall), and then I stop and the monster runs face first into my heel, and bounces off. Looks up at me, gulps, then runs for his little monster life as I follow behind leaving huge craters for footprints that if he fell into would kill him, and I am laughing.

I would have made Freddy my bitch in Dream Warriors. Freddy would be eating Vivarin like Pez and crying to his mommy to not let HIM go to sleep.

I hate those dreams though nothing makes sense. Like you're in a room with a girl that you put gum in her hair in the 2nd grade. Now it's 20yrs later and you're both sitting in class reading Pug, and she's talking about how her dog eats baking soda, and that her husband is a man of the sea.

You start telling her about your research into the migration habits of the dung beatle and explain to her the contribution of Linda Lavin to the world of the arts and theater by describing Alice as "ground- breaking".

In thos dreams, I know that I am dreaming but I can't wake myself up. So I have to sit there and have this stupid conversation.

The best sleep ever though is when you're kinda half in and half out in the morning, it's raining outside and still dark because it's so cloudy, and you hear the rain hitting the window. I would never get out of bed if every morning were like that.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 1999

They say, once you have a child, sleeping late is over. It is so very true. But, when you think you are going to scream because you want to sleep just five more minutes, she pulls at your shirt and says...."Up,Up." How can you resist that?

-- Anonymous, August 28, 1999

I used to love sleep. Now I hardly sleep at all; instead,I lie in bed thinking of all the things I should be doing instead. If I wake up at 3:30, I feel guilty for not getting up and cleaning something. And my rule is, if it's 4:30 or later when I wake up, I have to get out of bed.

It's a sickness, I know, but the cats don't help. Rudy starts knocking books on my head at about 4:45 every morning, and even if I spray him with water or yell at him or throw him off the bed, he comes back and starts again in a few minutes.

I used to love my bed; I had a great bed with a feather mattress and all kinds of nice sheets and blankets. Now it's just the place where I throw my clothes. Every night I clear off a little space and sleep for a few hours. And I hardly ever remember my dreams anymore.

-- Anonymous, August 28, 1999

I don't like to sleep. I feel like I'm wasting time. I have a really bad habit of being online until 11pm or midnight or maybe a little later than that, even though I get up at 5:15am. I've been doing this for about a month now, and my body is really paying for it. But do I stop? No.

Sometimes I even set my alarm on the weekends so I don't sleep past 8am or so.

I don't dream a whole lot - or if I do, I rarely remember them when I wake up. When I do dream, though, they are strange dreams, and they almost always involve huge groups of people that I went to school with, and the occasional celebrity (he's never my boyfriend, though, unless you count the dream I had about my date with Drew Carey or the dream I had that I was married to Billy Dean).

I think you know you're an internet addict when people you chat with are in your dreams, even though you've never met them in real life and you don't know what they look like... You just know it's them in the dream.

I'm getting delirious from sleep deprivation.

P.S. My mom has sleep apnea. I never realized how serious that was until she went to a sleep clinic and they told her she stopped breathing 54.7 times PER HOUR!!!

-- Anonymous, August 28, 1999

Sleep.... Ah, yes: coma is Our Friend! I get up weekdays at 0530 so I can get a parking space at school. So I never get to sleep til the weekend... But I'll sleep all Saturday if I can. And Sunday. Study? No, Coma Is Our Friend!

Dreams? Currently... the recurring one is on being a darkened library, bookshelves on levels up and away forever... And hunting down creatures... the Aliens from "Aliens"...before they can eat the books...

-- Anonymous, August 29, 1999

Usually, a Sunday afternoon nap is really enjoyed, but this afternoon, I had a nightmare: Soemone I really love was visiting me. Everything was going great, too great, if you know what I mean, when suddenly, they died. I started crying and screaming hysterically in my dream, "WAIT! WAIT! I still need to talk to you!" until I woke myself up. Of course, I then had to make the phone call to see if said person was alright (without saying why I was really calling). Crap, I still don't want to fall asleep tonight...

-- Anonymous, August 29, 1999

usually in my nightmares, it's like a stephen king novel, and i'm one of the good guys that gets killed. whoever said that you can't die in a dream or you'll die in real life is full of crap. happens to me all the time. it's unusual that you dream about your cat, pamie. my dog, lucky, a jack russell terrier almost never invades my dreams. oh, and for some reason all my dreams involve guns, and i'm usually the one wielding them. that may have some freudian reference, i'm not su

-- Anonymous, August 30, 1999

Fortunately, I sleep like the dead and rarely remember my dreams. Those few I do remember, I'm better off not. Once when a kid, I dreamed that we were having a barbeque, and the sunset suddenly got brighter and brighter, and then seemed to explode, like an h-bomb or a nova. Then, we were all in sort of a whirlpool like thing, going down, down, down. Then this humongous voice said, NOW IT IS THE END. NOW IT IS TIME FOR...

Then I woke up. I REALLY didn't want to know what it was time for.--Al

-- Anonymous, August 30, 1999

I never remembered my dreams before but in the last month or so I've started to remember a lot more. I now understand why people say dreams are weird. I have been battling insomnia since I was a little kid. Still am. I can't nap unless I'm sick or exhausted. Go figure.

-- Anonymous, August 30, 1999

My mom and dad are like sleep freaks. My dad has gone to a sleep laboratory like three times and he has to wear all of these retainers and things that open his nose, because the sleep deprivation gives him headaches. My mom is really neurotic and wakes suddenly with tasks that she has to finish, like stripping the bed that she and my dad are in. Or she'll be like,"Get Jeff, he fell down in the hall." Which I couldn't have done, since I'm four states away. But, he'll just go along with it, then they'll laugh about it the next day when they remember. They're exhausted, but they seem to get endless amusement from their night antics.

-- Anonymous, August 30, 1999

I'm really sorry to do this, but I have to quote Henry Miller, because I feel EXACTLY like this sometimes, and I bet a lot of others do, too. And he wrote it better than I ever could. "There are days when the return to life is painful and distressing. One leaves the realm of sleep against one's will. Nothing has happened, except an awareness that the deeper and truer reality belongs to the world of the unconscious. Thus one morning I opened my eyes involunarily, struggling frantically to fall back into that condition of bliss in which dream had wrapped me. So chagrined was I to find myself awake that I was on the point of tears. I closed my eyes and tried to sink back again into the world from which I had been so cruelly ejected. It was useless. I tried every device I had ever heard of but I could no more accomplish the trick than one can stop a bullet in flight and restore it to the empty chamber in a revolver. What remained, however, was the aura of the dream: in that I lingered voluptously. Some deep purpose had been fufilled, but before I had been given time to read the significance of it the slate had been sponged and I was thrust out, out into a world whhose one solution for everything was death. There were only a few tangible shreds left in my hand and, as those crumbs which the poor are supposed to gather from the tables of the rich, I clung to them greedily. But the crumbs dropped from the table of sleep are like the meager facts in a crime whose solution must ever remain a mystery. Those dripping images which, in the act of awakening, one spirits across the threshold like a mystic smuggler have a way of undergoing the most heartrending transformations on the hither side. They melt like ice cream on a sultry day in August. And yet, as they merge toward the inchoate magma which is the very stuff of the soul, some blurred knot of rememberance keeps alive forever, it would seemthe dim and velvety outline oof palpable, sentient continuum wherin they move and have, not their being, but reality. Reality! That which sustans and exalts life. It is in this stream that one crave to return and remain forever immersed."

-Henry Miller, from Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, book 1)

-- Anonymous, August 31, 1999

Working the graveyard shift, my sleep patterns are totally wacky, and my dreams tend to get a little bizarre but generally not that memorable. When I have time off and I actually get to sleep for extended periods of time, my dreams seem to be a lot more intense. It's like they've built up and I get a week's worth of dreams in one night.

And does anybody else do the twitching thing right as they go to sleep? I do it myself, and I can always tell when my girlfriend is dozing off because her legs and arms start spazzing a little.

-- Anonymous, August 31, 1999