|
|
|
What to do while it is happening
|
|
Nothing you do will make the big muscles obey, so trying to sit up is the worst use of the time, and it is the first thing everybody tries, myself included.
|
|
What seems to work is smaller: let the breathing carry on by itself, since the muscles doing it keep working throughout, then move something at the edges, an eye, a toe, the tongue, because the edges come back before the middle.
|
|
Most surveys agree that episodes come more often to people lying face up, though one of them found that the people who get it are no likelier to fall asleep that way, so a pillow behind your back is worth a week and is not a cure.
|
|
|
None of it makes the thing pleasant, though it does make it a thing with an ending, and that was most of what took the fear out of mine.
|
|
|
|
The ones that come back
|
|
Recurring dreams and nightmares get sent to me with an apology attached, as though a dream that repeats were a fault in the dreamer, when repeating is only the sleeping mind doing what the rest of us do with an unfinished argument.
|
|
So I would rather you wrote it down again on the fourth night than decided you already knew what it said, because the fourth night is never quite the version you remember from the first.
|
|
The details move about, and the moving is the useful part, since what changes is whatever your waking week has been doing to you.
|
|
|
✦ WRITE BACK
|
|
Of the three difficult ones, the paralysis, the nightmare, or the dream that keeps coming back, one of them is yours more than the other two.
|
|
TELL ME WHICH ONE
|
|
|
|
If you have had the figure at the foot of the bed, tell me what yours looked like, because the descriptions coming in line up in a way I did not expect.
|
| Sleep well, |
| Dream Signs |
|
|
|
P.S. My grandmother has a word for this, and when I asked what it meant she said it meant the old woman who sits on you, then asked whether I wanted more tea. If you have a word for it, tell me the word and who taught it to you. She thought it odd that I did not know it.
|
|
