I usually don't sleep well. Those crazy dreams...

My typical night to morning routine goes something like this:

    · Busy evening doing various whatevers after a long day of work and commute. Now past midnight; not even tired. Pumped by a day full of a caffeine, but I'm a night owl anyway.

    · Try to sleep

    · Look at clock; 1:46am

    · Take deep breaths, and try not to think

    · Pray, when I remember and think about it

    · Eventually go to sleep in the middle of the night; or the early morning depending how you look at it

    · Partially wake up approx. 4am

    · Enter into some deep sleep, during which I begin the most ridiculous dreams possible. Most of the dream details are a fog when I finally wake up, but these dreams almost always consist of the following:

        * A plot that is meaningless, farcical, or just plain stupid, but one in which I and any others in the dream act out with determined ferocity

        * Non-stop action, but without any resolution – leading to anxiety, confusion, and frustration

        * Dialogue that is well intentioned I'm sure, but is actually endlessly annoying and exasperating, since none of it makes sense and leads nowhere

    · When I do finally wake up out of this kind of a malaise of a dream, I am in a groggy state that affects me at least halfway through my morning. While the morning has never been my peak time, this just exacerbates the situation.

I don't know what to make of it. Might be the caffeine, or might just be my neural makeup. My dreams are sometimes so literal that with all of the action and anxiety, I wake up more tired than when I sent to sleep. Doesn't happen every morning, but when it does I am at a disadvantage with regard to clarity of thought and effort. Maybe just writing this down is therapeutic.

But as it happens, dreams have been a mystery to me for much of my life. As a young boy, I had awful dreams of my house catching on fire while I slept and of falling off a cliff suddenly. I can still see the sides of my house on fire, blackened char with glowing red spots. Or the worst - dreaming that I went to school without any pants on, only to wake up in a cold sweat and ever so thankful that it was all a dream. Perhaps many in their adolescence have such dreams. But for several years, possibly from about age nine or ten until my later teen years, I had a recurring dream that I still don't have an explanation for.

In the recurring dream, I see my hands and nothing else. Not the rest of my torso or legs. No discernible background is visible. I unfold a pocket knife, except that at the end of the blade, another blade is connected, and then another, and so on... After unfolding several blades from this pocket knife, the blades recoil around my hand quickly. Many times this would cause my hands to bleed, but sometimes no bleeding occurred. I know...bizarre.

...

I have prayed for God to keep Satan out of my dreams. I am not crediting the enemy for all of my dream problems, but I believe that he has the ability to inhabit dreams and/or nightmares. I pray for God to give me pure healthy sleep, and then to rise the next day and praise His Holy Name.