One of the things I don’t like about academic work is that it’s taking away much of my sleep time.

I like sleeping. I like the feeling of falling down whenever I’m on the verge of it, which usually happen when I was particularly mobile that day. The first time I remembered it happen I was about 4 or 5, the time I started going to school. The sensation of falling down then was associated with my dream of floating down slowly from where I could see a basketball ring, like associating my fall with a ball’s going down trajectory but in slow motion. During those times it would happen to me I’d feel apprehensive. For one, I can’t fly. So it’s associated with helplessness. But later on when I had to cut some of my sleeping time I found myself welcoming those feelings of letting go, like they’ve become for me transition states from the world of stress into the world of contentment.

What I am thankful about just now is that I still have the capacity to almost immediately start dreaming just a few minutes into closing my eyes.

Sometimes it doesn’t even have to take the closing of my eyes before I’d start dreaming. These are those times when I’ve been sitting tire-fully in class and fighting off sleep and then suddenly I’d realize I’m witnessing something that doesn’t belong in class. One time I was sitting up perfectly straight at a teacher’s lecture, pen in hand, but the things I write down have nothing to do with the lesson. All the while my act of writing down was supposedly for taking down notes. Voila. Before I knew it I was already in dreamland 🙂 I was writing down words associated with my dream. One of those was “worm”, and I think it was because my teacher was then using a flower, drawing it on the board in chalk, for illustrating some abstract algebra concept that had to do with rotations and flips and turns (hahaha! I couldn’t even understand it perfectly then!) and there I was writing down on my notebook the word for creatures having the same body shape with caterpillars, creatures that wriggle on plants (haha!)

I don’t want to lose this ability to instantaneously dream. For minute naps they are my sure proof that indeed I have fallen asleep, and I feel glad for having them.

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