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The ones who really come up empty
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There is a small group who report nothing even when they are woken on purpose, over and over, and I would rather tell you that than pretend the picture is tidier than it is.
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Stranger still, there are people whose bodies act out whole scenes in the night, talking and arguing, who wake up with none of it, which suggests the dreaming and the keeping of it are two separate jobs.
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One practical thing sits inside that work, which is that in a sleep clinic, patients reporting no dreams at all often turned out to have breathing trouble at night, so if you snore heavily and wake up tired, that is worth a word with a doctor.
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For everybody else, the fix is the hour you get up rather than anything you do in the night.
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Give yourself a fair test
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Pick a morning with nowhere to be, let yourself come up slowly, and stay in the position you woke in, since the best conditions for this are a lie-in rather than a working day.
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Then take whatever is there, even if it is only a colour or a room or a feeling about somebody, because people who insist they had nothing will often produce a fragment when you ask a second time.
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Give that a week before you decide, and if the answer is still nothing, then it is nothing, and you are allowed to keep reading for other people’s.
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✦ WRITE BACK
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Empty mornings come in two kinds, nothing at all and a feeling with no pictures attached, and I would like to know which yours are.
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TELL ME WHICH ONE
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He has agreed to try it on Sunday, mostly to prove me wrong, which is the best reason anybody has ever had for doing anything.
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| Sleep well, |
| Dream Signs |
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P.S. As he was putting his coat on he stopped and said that he does get one thing, which is a smell of his grandmother’s kitchen, some mornings, for a second, and that he had never counted it. Tell me what you wake with. I would count it.
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