Dream sleep

Last night, after a long weekend, I decided to catch up on a couple of episodes of Dexter before going to sleep. I then proceeded to have the nightmare of my life, even if it was of a fairly familiar sort, i.e., being chased down a dark hallway by axe-wielding murderers and that kind of thing. Now I don’t have this kind of dream every time I watch Dexter, which I find funny in a disturbingly creepy way (or creepy in a disturbingly funny way?), but this nightmare was pretty remarkable for its clarity and sustained sequences. Ordinarily, my dreams take me all over the place, transporting me from one fuzzy scene to the next with no rhyme or reason. Could it be attributable to the fact that I’d spent much of the day reading up on dream iconography in the Italian Renaissance, and Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘dream sleep’ induced by capitalism over 19th century Europe, all part of my seemingly never-ending paper on the sociology of sleep? More likely, it’s due to to the double cheeseburger I had for dinner, the kind of meal I really should no longer be having.

On an aside, I’ve not posted much recently. Though I continue to read other blogs quite regularly, I find myself casually forgetting that I have my own blog, which isn’t a good sign. I think it’s one of those phases that I - and many other bloggers, I think - go through now and then when the plan of having no plan becomes something of a burden, and a rethink of the whole enterprise becomes necessary. We’ll see.