Why I Sleep Less Than Seven Hours Daily

And today I remember why I didn't really like sleeping seven hours.

Dreaming, in a certain sense, is a most wonderful thing to be had. It allows one to explore the subconscious, to experience things that do not occur that easily (if at all!) in real life, all with the innate safety of it being merely a figment of one's imagination.

It is also a great source of false hope, disappointment, and general malcontentment with life when one realises what one's life could be.

I have slept roughly seven hours on two separate occasions over the weekend, and in each time, I wake up the next day feeling shaken.

It's not so much as it involved supernatural spirits---I'm used to seeing that in my dreams, and usually I'm aware enough of the fact that I'm dreaming that I can will things to happen the way I want, but that it involved something that strikes a chord within myself.

You see, in each of the dreams, there was a girl involved, and each time, it ended with me being in tears.

I was dreaming that I had fallen in love with an arabian girl in my first night. Now almost two days later, I cannot really remember much, but suffice to say, it got me confused when I started thinking about the practicalities of the matter, like how she and I were supposed to be living together, with her entrenched strongly in her religion, and me not wanting to sacrifice my mostly independent mind to follow a religion [Ed: Read between the lines to understand what I'm talking about here.]. That prompted me to look up the said information when I woke up (the hell), and I found that it was impossible for her to leave her religion behind, not unless she wants to undergo the penalty of death.

Talking about taking a dream seriously.

In the next dream, the one that I just had nearly two hours ago, it seemed to be a conflated version of the the world of Pittsburgh I left behind and something that spawned out of Tekka Market. I was a tech-wiz in the dream, having some ability that I am currently unable to recall. Anyway, I ended up living with a bunch of people in the same apartment of sorts on the ground floor or something, and in the end, we all decided to leave it, for some reason. One of the girls who lived with us was my love interest in the dream, and we decided to head out together. Somehow it got to me taking her to visit my grandmother, who was some psychic located on the second floor of a shopping centre that seemed to follow the ambience of the local Tekka Market while having a layout similar to that of the Mall Atrium in Dead Centre of Left4Dead 2. Anyway, we went there after walking past some shophouses, including one which was a dojo for Aikido, and once we got there, she got really scared. It turns out that she could see spirits, and my grandmother's shop (paradoxically located one floor above the alteration shop below it with no other way up than from the stairs within the lower shop) was full of the spirits. In fact, it was so full that the floor space outside of the alteration shop itself was full of spirits. The girl got very scared, and we left, and then she left me. I found myself returning to this part of town that looked like a mix between something from Left4Dead 2 and Pittsburgh, with me walking about partly in the wilderness and partly within the town itself, at one point even boarding a bus like the one's I've seen in Pittsburgh, and sleeping in it. There was also a strange ship building exercise that wanted to build some boat doing some important stuff using some environmentally friendly process.

Of course I couldn't make head nor tail of what my dreams were talking about, since it is now two hours after I had awaken, which made it neigh impossible to remember correctly. Strangely though, each of these dreams involved me being romantically attached to some female, even though it were only for a short period of time. And when I woke up, I immediately thought of Mint for some reason, and that prompted me to wonder out loud on that infernal stalker tool: ``Is a relationship less real if it only lasted for that short period of time?''

So, is a relationship less real if it only lasted for that short period of time? Apparently from my perspective, that is hardly true---I'm still thinking about Mint, even though I'm pretty certain she isn't thinking about me. Sometimes, when I'm not paying attention, I find myself drifting in thought to Ida, though to be fair, it was more of fond memories than a strong sense of let's-get-back-togetherness. I suppose that thinking about the people you had known in a significant way in the past is part and parcel of being human, but sometimes it does get a little unnerving considering everything.

And that's the real reason why I don't like to sleep for long. I don't want to remember the dreams that present me an alternative reality that can be, at times, more real than the one I'm currently in, tempting me to just end this reality to seek the hopes and dreams that the other one raises.