Sleep and I have always had a very rocky relationship.
I remember being a child, lying awake for hours every night.
It seemed like such a waste of time!
Nothing helps me to drift off.
Those who can sleep smugly suggest things, like ‘not thinking so much’ or ‘just
close your eyes and it’ll be morning’.
But it doesn’t help.
MAYBE I’M JUST NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH.
I once counted to over 30,000 in one night!
I then made it my mission to count to a million and reached it in a year.
One of my many pointless life achievements.
Any way, that didn’t happen last night.
Instead, I fell asleep early, at a normal time, exhausted.
You might think that’s a good sign!
But I knew already at the time it wasn’t, since I woke up 3 hours later, still tired,
but unable to drift off again.
I typed this video up as the sun was rising, my eyes still burning and knowing full well
that tiredness would hit me at about midday throwing my sleep cycle completely out of
whack for another week.
It seems as though I’m playing a constant game with sleep, trying to outsmart it in
order to attend appointments and other social events.
It upsets me because I feel I spent most of my life operating at 50% performance.
I still vividly remember I had a week at University where I’d get cold and shivery at about
10 at night.
Sort of like the flu but not.
I’d go to sleep and would have 8 solid, deep hours of sleep.
I couldn’t believe the difference it made!
It was as though I was a different person!
In the 16 hours that followed, I could actually concentrate and make sense of lectures and
enjoyed and even excelled at talking to people when normally it takes me so long to warm
up.
But then, it returned to normal and I realised how messed up I had been the rest of my life.
Since then, employers have interrogated my lifestyle, trying to find something I’m
doing wrong.
Family holidays are torture and what is normally a waste of a third of your life gets stretched
out for hours in both directions, with a bit of torture in the middle as well, because
why not.
In most ways, I have been very lucky.
I am fit.
I am healthy.
I enjoy many things and have the freedom to do them.
But with sleep, I rolled a 1.
This has been it until recently.
But 2016 saw me experiencing some more…
sinister things at night.
Or whenever it was that I was sleeping.
I have finally suffered sleep paralysis.
I even had an out of body experience and some other things that Google search comes up blank
for, but that perhaps some of you who are watching this video can relate with.
I really did win at sleep-disruption bingo last year.
Let’s begin.
Somewhat ironically, this first video will be covering dreams.
You see, I want to cover the least disturbing things first!
I had a dream that my Mum’s arm turned green from a horrible infection.
I was very young at the time.
Maybe 6 or 7.
And it’s in this dream that I first experienced lucid dreaming.
This is where, mid-way through a dream, you become aware that you’re sleeping!
I was sat on the stairs when I suddenly realised that I could feel my eyes were closed.
I paced up and down the stairs, trying to figure out a way of waking up.
Then I woke up.
Exciting stuff, right?!
I’ve had it several times since.
I have it on long coach journeys, where I picture I’m sat on the coach just like I
actually am but then I open my eyes and see the real thing, which is usually a bit different-looking
to my dream version!
Sometimes realising I’m dreaming causes me to start waking up and the dream begins
to slip away.
Other times, something scary is about to happen in a dream and I scrunch my eyes up over and
over again because that seems to be the only thing I can do to wake myself from a dream.
I went through a stage of trying to induce lucid dreams.
There are several ways of doing this that I found online, the most effective I’ve
found is to count your digits.
I always have more than 5 in my dreams.
Stupidly, even noticing this doesn’t always cause me to realise that I’m in a dream.
A lot of the time I’ll be like ‘oh look at that’ then carry on like nothing happened.
But other times it does alert me to the fact that I’m dreaming.
But first, let’s look at how odd that finger-test is.
It’s not like I’ve got a huge load of them poking out of my hand!
It’s more like I’m losing count of something that I’m not really able to see in the first
place.
The truth is, your brain is extremely limited.
Don’t worry: mine is too.
If you close your eyes and imagine a dot, you can do it.
2, 3 and even 4 dots are fine.
But beyond that it suddenly becomes difficult to imagine where they are in relation to each
other, all at the same time.
You might say ‘I can do it easy!’.
Yeah, you think you are.
You’re not.
It’s a bit like imagining a place you’ve been to and think you can remember.
The hair dresser’s.
Or the local super market!
Maybe your friend’s house!
You think you can see it clearly in your mind.
But it’s just a very basic representation of it.
They seem like elaborate worlds, but when you stop to inspect it, it panics, then throws
you some stuff it thinks that you‘ll accept.
It’s all just an ILLUSION.
An ever-growing lie.
A private show put on to entertain you while you sleep!
Doesn’t that make you feel special.
This place you’re imagining, try focusing on one bit in particular.
What colour are the floor tiles?
Think you can remember the pattern?
What about the ceiling?
Who’s in this place and what are their faces?
Unless you’ve specifically paid attention to these details in the past, you won’t
manage a very good guess now.
This is why you can’t draw a very accurate picture of something from memory.
Once again you might think you can, until you compare it to the real thing and realise
just how many details you’ve forgotten or misrepresented.
The reason I’m dissing your brain so much is because dreams are the same thing.
They’re approximations of a situation, dipped in nostalgia that you happily accept as actually
happening.
Do you honestly think it’s generating a massively complex world around you in real-time?
Is it really so superior to you when you’re awake?!
I have managed to induce lucid dreams.
And I have tried to control them.
I’ve had some interesting results.
Do you know what happens when you read a book in a dream?
You see words.
It doesn’t make much sense, but your mind just accepts it as sort of okay, even if you’re
thinking that it’s a bit odd at the time.
And you’re not exactly going to write a letter of complaint to your mind for shoddy
dream-crafting, are you.
But what’s interesting is when you re-read the same sentence again and it’s changed.
It’s like your mind is generating the text as you’re going!
That’s because it is.
Did you really think your brain was going to bother writing information about what you’ve
read in a dream to its memory?!
Speaking of computer analogies, another time I kind of tried benchmarking my brain by smashing
a rock into a million pieces to see if it could handle the physics.
It could!
Just as -right now- you can imagine a rock shattering, crumbling and all of the bits
falling to the floor.
Of course, the visual representation of this in a dream is far more vivid.
And clearly your mind isn’t calculating all of those millions of particles.
Just like when you try to imagine a place you know, it’s just telling your brain it
is and you’re kind of accepting it.
Flying in dreams has been the holy grail for me.
I have always been able to glide, and occasionally I can get off the ground a bit by wildly flapping
my arms.
But genuine, free flying has been beyond me for almost all of my dreams.
When I can it’s exhilarating beyond words.
One of the best experiences I can imagine.
But I don’t seem to be capable of choosing whether I can or not, even if I’m lucidly
dreaming.
And that’s the eerie bit: even if you’re aware that you’re dreaming, you’re not
fully in control.
You can’t just conjure up anything you want to.
It’s like you have to send something to the back of your mind and let it decide whether
it wants to or not.
One time I tried, my dream went all cartoonish, as though my subconscious was showing me how
rubbish my dream would be if I took control.
That’s scary.
When you realise how powerless you are over your dreams and that there’s something in
your head choosing it for you, beyond your control.
I could give examples of this, but I’m sure you know better than I do what you’d least
like to have happen to you right now.
And remember that by thinking of those things, you’re giving your subconscious a chance
to do them.
And sometimes in dreams, it’s scarier when it decides not to.
As though it’s raising the tension like a horror movie would.
You know what’s weirder than having a dream?
What it must be like for people who have never had them.
And yes, they exist.
I know two weirdos who have never had dreams!
It was only in a proper conversation with them that I realised they didn’t know what
a dream was.
My old housemate thought it was a story you made up in your mind before you went to sleep,
and wondered why people would think up nightmares.
And my ex hadn’t ever really thought about it.
But the oddest thing was, neither of them considered it weird.
That when we’re asleep, most of us drift into worlds created by our imaginations, that
have some weird plot to them and that we’re only partially in control of!
And sure, you might go a long time between remembering dreams that you’ve had.
But surely you’ve at least been aware of having one at some point in your life?!
If I had never had one then I would interrogate those who had, learning what I could about
them.
I might even consider the possibility that they’re all in on some big practical joke
that only I’m not involved with!
And if you think I sound crazy right now just think of what we’re all doing when we’re
asleep every night.
Who’s the crazy one now?!
And lastly, sensations in dreams.
Try to imagine something horrible that hasn’t happened to you yet.
For me I guess it would be a close family member dying.
It’s not a nice thing to think about, but you can’t even begin to fathom what it would
feel like.
And yet, experience it in dreams and it’s so intense and feels so real!
I swear that my dreams can often feel more vivid than real life does.
I remember crying to my Mum when I was a toddler because I missed a nice dream I once had.
I was such a pussy.
But it confirms my point: the pure terror, or joy that dreams can deliver has always
been something that I have always found fascinating.
But it shocks me that when something does happen in reality, just how similar it feels
to dreams that you previously had where something like that have happened.
Makes sense I guess, since in both situations it’s your brain telling you how you feel.
But I swear that it can do it, even for physical things!
It’s had a good track record in the past, though I’m yet to know how similar acute
radiation sickness or DYING feels in real life.
Not exactly things I want to experience any time soon so I’m happy just knowing what
they’re like in dreams for now!
It’s really nice to get all of these things off my chest, to finally make a video about
them.
And I haven’t even covered the weirdest and most unbelievable things yet.
I’ll be saving sleep paralysis for a later video in this trilogy of terror.
But you might have already had a bit of it yourself and just not realised!
You probably know that your body is paralysed when you’re sleeping, to stop you from acting
out your dreams.
But have you ever screamed from a nightmare?
Perhaps tried to shout something, most likely MUM, only to make a strange, garbled moan
instead?
That’s a bit of the paralysis right there.
I think the screams that people make when they’re in this state are utterly terrifying.
I know that I’ve made them.
Sometimes I remember them.
Other times, I’ve been in a caravan and my parents have asked why I’m screaming.
Here are some I’ve found online.
Sweet dreams!