With thanks to hosts D.L. Hammons and Nicole Zoltack, we have another year of the Deja Vu Blogfest. In this event we post a blog post from the past year that we'd like to see get more exposure. That's an easy one for my blog about dreams A Faraway View since this blog gets very few visitors. Maybe this blogfest will change that.The post I've chosen to revive from the past appeared on Thursday March 13th of 2014. I hope this reappearance whets your curiosity enough to visit again now and then. A Faraway View normally posts each Thursday.
The Adverse Affect of Blogging on Dreams
 |
| Example of dark circles (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Since I began blogging in September of 2009, more than once have I awoken in the midst of a night's sleep with a concern about blogging. Before I learned how to pre-schedule blog posts I would just write a post and then publish it. This lead to posts appearing randomly at various times of day. Then I read somewhere that posts should appear on a regular time schedule. I just had to figure out what time would be best.
This concern about posting times began to cause me to wake up at odd hours at times. Usually I would try to have a post completed so I could publish it as soon as I woke up. Sometimes I would forget and remember during the night. It was probably in dreams that I was reminded about preparing my post to publish in the morning. Sometimes my sleep, hence my dreams was disrupted.
The discovery of scheduling the posts to appear automatically at designated times was a boon and a blessing to my sleep time--for the most part that is. Blogging and internet in general still frequently affects my sleep and dreams in an adverse way.
This phenomena is comparable to dreaming about work, school, or anything that might involve a major part of our lives. These days I spend so much of my time on the internet and doing things related to my blogs that these activities preoccupy much of my thinking both consciously and subconsciously. I won't make any mental health judgments about this. It's just the way things are in my life now.
Occasionally I have awoken from a dream about blogging--usually not a troubling dream, but one that causes me to dwell upon my blogging. The dream may be related to an idea for a post. There are times when I have gotten up in the middle of the night to compose a post or at least lay out a considerable amount of notes so the idea would not be forgotten. Naturally this takes away time from sleep and dreams.
At other times I might dream about other bloggers. This is usually not adverse I would suppose, but these dreams can create a peculiar sense of involvement with people I don't actually know. Can such fantasies play a negative role in my perception of waking life?
Then, as I have mentioned in other blog posts, my dreams sometimes delude me into thinking something is wrong with my blog, my computer, or some aspect of my internet life. Sometimes I wake up confused from dreams such as these and it may take a while for me to understand that I was only dreaming.
Probably my major concern is that blogging draws me away from sleep and dreams and I may have a compulsion to go online instead of sleeping when I should be at a state of rest. This can result in sleep deprivation. I often feel tired and think this may be a reason why. Being tired, I will typically take an afternoon nap during which any dreams that I have are usually not what I would call "quality dreams" in that they don't seem long enough, they lack story and have minimal coherency insomuch that a dream can be considered to be "coherent".
There is no good solution to this that I can think of. And in fairness to my internet involvement, my sleeping habits do seem to be getting better of late. Then again, maybe I'm just adapting to having the internet influence in my life. This may just be another plight of modern existence.
Is your sleep and dream life affected by your activity on line? Do you think the internet can be a danger to the mind? What are some ways that modern technology intrudes on your ability to sleep well and dream healthily?
