I’ve been meaning to write about this, but I have been procrastinating cuz I am not quite sure where I should start. I finally decide that I should jot this down to justify my lame excuse on why I sleep so less lately.

My best friend Pauline knock on my head through twitter early this morning, saying that 4-5 hours sleep is not enough for me, and I should sleep more. Regularly. I bet she’s wanting to kick my butt and punch some senses into my thick skull, and get some proper sleep instead of being such a vamp.

But the thing here is, I can’t sleep. I have difficulties going to sleep, ever since the fire happened. No matter how hard I try, I’ll end up tossing and turning on the bed, and it frustrates me, and therefore the 3 o’clock fairy’s solitude becomes a habit. I end up doing things when people around me are sleeping their head off.

When night arrives, I’ll feel too alert to sleep, and could only go to sleep when the sun rises. Thank heavens I am a freelance, else I would be fired from my job.

Anyway, back to the point. I used to have disturbing dreams and nightmares a few years back. It slowly gets better as I began to jot down my dreams and nightmares that I got when I was asleep in my dream diary when I woke up. Slowly, gradually, the lingering nightmares began to fade, but lately, it happened again, and I am not quite sure what contributes to it. Stress? Trauma? I am not quite sure.

I know what dreams are made of, they are our subconscious. Or the memories or things that we want to lock away but unable to when we’re asleep. They are made of stress and the events that happened when we’re awake.

I am not quite sure what’s going on with me and my body, but the problems 3 years back reoccurs again, and I began to experience reoccurring dreams. The worst thing about these recurring dreams and nightmares is that the memories of it lingers in my head when I woke up. I could not forget those dreams as they are too vivid. Some of these dreams are so real and horrible that sometimes, I woke up sweating, gasping for breath and sometimes, even more worst, screaming. These dreams, often confuses me, and it’s hard to distinguish between dreams and reality sometimes.

Sleep…is not something that’s relaxing to me these days. Hey… don’t blame me. Can you imagine going to sleep dreaming that your loved ones are killed, desert you or even betray you in the worst way possible? Killed in an accident, killed by people you hate, killed by the fire or even murdered. Seeing your loved ones… like your husband or wife having sex with someone else before your very eyes and many more does not sit well with me. To be honest, I am afraid to go to close my eyes and go to sleep. Of course the dreams are not all bad all the time. There are good ones, but I don’t get them often.

I think, before things get out of hand, I should control my dreams and not my dreams control me, and therefore, I’m going to revive my long forgotten habit, which is to write down my dreams and nightmare on my Dream Diary.

And since my Dream Diary was spared from the fire a couple of months ago, I think I am going to just resume it from the last entry…It was Wednesday, 7th September 2005, sleep cycle 11.00pm-7.00am. Well… it’s time to say hello to old friends again. Unless someone want to sponsor me some nice journal or notebook to write as a Xmas pressie. 😛

See… below is my old dream diary. Dating back to year 2004. *sigh* Now I have to use it again so that I can vanguish my nightmares and make fun of em. or better still, use them as an inspiration for my novels and upcoming works. Great idea, no?

The dream diaries are small notebooks with tiny locks attach to it. It’s all rusty now. I tried finding similar notebooks a few days ago, but couldn’t find it anyway. guess I’ll just have to write on the remaining diaries until I run out of pages and get a new one.

Some of you may be intrigue with Dream Diaries and want to keep one of your own. Here’s some tips for you, in case you want to jot down your dreams like me for reasons only known to yourself.

You will need to keep a dream diary if you want to work on your dreams. A dream diary is like a daily diary except that in it you record your sleeping instead of your waking adventures. You should keep paper and pencil by the side of your bed and record your dreams upon awaking, otherwise, you will forget your dreams easily.

But what kind of detail should you include in your dream diary? The answer is, the more detail the better. As you gain practice and train yourself in a dream recall, you will find more and more details come back to you. Write them down.

The following are some points you should bear in mind:

1. Write down the dream events in their proper order. This may seem unimportant if the events appear unrelated to each other. But once you begin the process of analysis, relationships often become very clear.

2. Keep a careful note of the dream characters. Who was in your dream and what did he or she do? If they remind you of someone you know in waking life, write this down. Don’t trust to memory.

3. If well-known scenery appears, record any differences between it and the same scenery in waking life. Were the bookshelves in the right places? Were the books the same as real life? And so on.

4. Similarly, record any differences between well-known people in the dream and in real life.

5. Record any non-human characters that appeared in the dream (animals, ghosts) or any inanimate objects that behaved as if alive.

6. Make a special note of any recurring events, themes or characters. Do they always occur/behave in exactly the same way?

7. Not down all the colours you see.

8. Note down your emotional responses to everything.

Finally don’t trust to memory. When you read back over your dream diary you may find you have no recollection at all of having some of the dreams. However clear they seem at the time, write them down.

Cleffairy: Recurring dreams and nightmares bothers me. And I might as well write them down and make fun of them instead of letting the dragons bites me!