The Sleeper Awakens

Do dreams have plots?

I have a terrible time sleeping. Thoughts swarm through my head like flies on a carcass. I get a measure of relief from my insomnia with a generic sleep aid that costs less than $10 a month. During a recent visited my doctor, I complained that I was lucky to wring six hours out of a dose. He offered me a prescription to the newly released generic version of Ambien CR.

It was over $100 a month! I politely declined my pharmacist’s offer to fill it. I still had two months to go on my previous prescription, but when I went to fill the last month’s supply, she informed me that the prescription had expired. I was in deep doo-doo.

Desperate for a substitute, I took four Benadryl, an antihistamine which is sold over the counter as a sleep aid. I felt like I was hooked directly to house current! My heart raced. Sleep completely eluded me.

When I finally passed into troubled dreams in the wee hours of the morning, my usual strange dreams took a bizarre turn.

It had a better plot than some of my novels. I don’t remember all the details, but the principal character had a problem and attempted various strategies to get some critical paperwork. He was confronted by the usual bureaucratic hassles and was assisted by friends or colleagues.

I read somewhere that we attempt to resolve real conflicts in our lives by reenacting them in sometimes symbolic form during REM sleep. We may not come up with an answer, but we wake up feeling better about whatever was troubling us.

Being an unemployed novelist, my life is relatively unencumbered by bureaucratic encounters of any kind. True, I’ve been arm wrestling with AT&T about getting a DSL connection to the internet, and I had to grovel before various Delta Airlines gate agents to get my granddaughters back to Ireland, but that was all behind me. And the book I’m working on now has no bureaucracy in it at all, yet.

I’m at a loss.

The larger question is, do dreams generally have plots? Most of the ones I remember vividly are more like endless video loops, the same problem keeps popping up, and nothing my dream self can do seems to resolve it.

Maybe I need to recruit a better writer for my dreams, or find out who produced that sleep deprived terror I suffered through last night.

I still don’t have any pills. Let’s hope I fare better tonight without Benadryl or my usual drug of choice.