I Gotta Dream

One morning, I woke up and saw these weird drawings of llamas on my bedside table. My first thought was that Little James had made me a card, then I realised the pictures were in my wobbly, middle-of-the-night handwriting. 

Slowly, the events leading up to the weird drawings came back to me…

Eventually, I remembered my dream. I was a reindeer-crossed-llama having a drink at a bar when another llama proposed to me. He said in his culture, it was customary for a male llama (what is a male llama even called?) to shave off his fur and knit a beautiful turtleneck jumper to present to his betrothed. 

Whenever I fall asleep, I dream. I could fall asleep on a car trip, be asleep for less than ten minutes, and have several dreams during that period. Family and friends tell me this is impossible. People only have vivid dreams during REM sleep, and not enough time has elapsed for me to be in REM sleep on a car trip.

At night, it feels like I’m dreaming the whole time I’m asleep. My dreams run into each other, only stopping when I wake up abruptly… then fall back asleep into another weird dream. On average, I wake up about five to six times a night. Sometimes, I can’t fall back asleep, so I get up and do random drawing or writing. It’s part of my ADHD.

When I was young, I thought this was normal sleep behaviour. I was surprised when I looked in on my family at random times during the night, to find that they were all sound asleep. I figured they must be getting up at other times, and we kept missing each other. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I figured out most people sleep through the night. And their dreams didn’t feel like an all-night movie marathon. 

I’m not complaining… much. My ADHD is a big part of my creativity. Half of my story ideas come from my dreams. (Not this one, obviously). But it would be nice to get a good night's sleep for once. I think I’m going to have a nap now.