Dreams

Sometimes, when I'm really tired, I can't keep my eyes open. And I don't mean this in the sort of 'drifting off to sleep' sort of way, but that it is a physical fight to try to keep my eyes open, that I lose. Try as I might, it's like I simply don't have strong enough muscles to do it. I feel actual physical strain with the effort. It's not always that I'm sleepy when this happens, just that my eyes seem to have given up working for a while.

This doesn't happen to me often, but when it does, it is terribly debilitating. Although I feel at least moderately awake mentally, I can't see which makes doing anything a challenge.

For the first time yesterday afternoon I dreamed that this was happening to me. I was asleep, dreaming that I couldn't stay awake. I was in a church (not an LDS church) with Shannon and some of my family, and my sister was trying to tell me that I needed to change benches. Most of my family was sitting on the bench behind me. But I couldn't change benches, because I couldn't see. My eyes wouldn't open. (If you close your eyes in your dream, can you still see? It turns out, kinda. Just like if you close your eyes in the room you are in right now, you can still imagine where everything is, I was doing the same thing in my dream. So I could imagine where they benches in the church were.) But in my dream, I knew it was vitally important that I open my eyes so I could see my way to the next bench. No one wants to trip and fall in church and make a scene (and then have to explain that you fell because you were walking around with your eyes closed!) So I had to fight and fight to open my eyes. And finally, I managed to do it. And I saw a window.

Not a church stained glass type window (because that's the sort of window this church would have had) but a regular boring window from a house looking out on a bright sunny day, not a somewhat dimly lit church. I briefly looked out this window, and suddenly, my dream switched to me being outside and I was walking down the street. I think my brain was trying to deal with the fact that it had just seen a bright outside scene. I still couldn't open my eyes.

A few minutes later, I woke up. And what did I see? The window. I was laying on my bed (on Shannon's side) pointed straight at the window from my dream. And so, I conclude that I actually tried so hard in my dream to open my eyes, that I did it in real life. I managed to open my eyes while dreaming! Feynman would be so proud.