The vital importance of sleep is often underrated. My friend chiropractor Rabia Barkins is writing a whole book about sleep and sleep disorders. She has so much material, she is already thinking about a second volume. She endured sleep disruptions for some time and knows the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation.
I am not well-conversant with what goes on in the brain during sleep but what I do know makes sense. Sleep is R & R for your brain cells, as well as the rest of your body. With all the work it does for you during the day, and the garbage it picked up, sleep is akin to a four-to-eight-hour detox.
In an oxygen therapy program I did last year, the staff talked about “clearing out the senescent cells” your brain has accumulated over your life. As I understand it, senescent cells have stopped growing and just hang around cluttering up your brain and decreasing your overall brain performance.
So our oxygen therapy program sounded a little like clearing out an attic. Like your brain is a place that you keep throwing stuff up into year after year as a matter of living. What accumulates there gets dusty and starts to break down. Like we all do.
That is my layperson’s interpretation of senescent cells. Like any good decluttering, getting rid of them makes good sense.
Most of the time I love dreaming (nightmares excluded) and again know very little about what takes place during REM sleep. But it is this phase that is supposed to do a deep dive into whatever issues you are wrestling with.
I don’t put a lot of faith in believing that my dreams really sort out major life issues. It sometimes seems quite the opposite. They often make me more confused, if entertained. So if you look at dreams as some sort of arcane theater that none of us understands very well, then you can become more of an observer of your own dreams. Don’t ask me how that is possible. I just know I have done it from time to time.
I love the sheer lunacy of some dreams. Often they seem a lot like Alice in Wonderland without the Red Queen and a far less organized storyline. Dreams are so random. Stories about people I know or would like to know predominated for a time.
When she was still here, I frequently dreamt of Princess Diana and how she and I had become best buddies. I think I related to her vulnerability and disrupted childhood. The similarities ended there.
But they were great dreams. Lots of garden parties on bright sunny days on big estate grounds and delicious little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Vistas all around of lovely well-dressed people gossiping and socializing as only the Royals and their society might do. Diana would occasionally ask me for fashion advice which I would occasionally give her. This absurd memory still makes me chuckle.
It is noteworthy that those sorts of dreams occurred most frequently when my life circumstances were such that I was the last possible person on Earth to be invited to a Royal gathering. Pure escapism.
But as a television reporter, I had a genuine interaction with Prince Andrew. It was on a Royal tour he was making of Canada at one of those chi-chi garden parties on the lieutenant governor’s estate. I got a full-on view of the kowtowing and pandering around him, especially the media.
As history would have it, I am very lucky I didn’t get to know him one whit better than I did. Ew. Saved by destiny and his utter disinterest in a commoner news reporter from one of the Commonwealth’s “provinces”.
So whatever else I may dream about tonight, it likely won’t be the struggling Windsor family and their issues’ issues. They’re still working to find their feet it would appear. The harsh light of media and incessant exposure has taken considerable bloom off the Royal rose.
Tonight, I will head to sleep with another famous Brit in my head. “To sleep, perchance to dream”. Unlike Hamlet’s fear of what may plague him after he slips into unconsciousness, I rather enjoy my dreams.
I know piteously little about the mechanics or intricacies of sleep. I just know I like it and I need it. Off to find out what my brain intends to share with me tonight.
Expressive Compulsive 
Dreams, “the royal road to the unconscious” Freud said. Waking dreams, sleeping ones all revealing something about our unconsciousness. Some compensate. My excursion into the realm of drama began with Carl Jung. I kept a dream journal faithfully for years. Then I began to humm “merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.” So I began play with interpreting the waking dream. So much fun and elucidation! I did that with others, and they, too found it helpful. There’s a reflective quality to our realities. We can go so far as to say there’s “mirror like wisdom” in them as Buddha offered us. Water is what I call an essential elemental wisdom energy that, among its qualities, is that in those still waters everything is clearly reflected. No waves. No distortions of mental overlays from unconscious content skewing the clear seeing.
How do we know we’ve slept well or not? In deep sleep, for example, there’s nothing going on but sleeping. It’s why it’s so rejuvenating. Sometimes our dreams do work things out. But also in deep sleep our systems are freed to be tended directly, no ideas of mind conscious or unconscious laying on their forms. And we awaken with something having worked out. With clarity or a new idea/insight.
For some deep non-meditation of and as Stillness offers the same thing as deep sleep. It renews our minds, hearts, bellies in getting real quiet and still in our Source. It’s enlivening. But our business busyness keeps telling us we don’t have time for what is essential. It relaxes and can allow us to get some rest and even sleep!
We and our nervous systems are overstimulated and overwrought, overwhelmed. I’m sure Rabia is going to explain much more about what keeps us for sleeping adequately and what helps that.
After my father died I ended up living with a family and the woman, a lively quirky woman I loved, took cat naps. I don’t know that she slept throughout the night or got several hours at a stretch or not. She was quite content with her naps.
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