Thinking about the last post on Existential Angst, one thing I'm noticing often now is that my day tends to be pretty unproductive when I sleep late and wake up early, this is even if I get some naps in.

There are a lot of other social inconveniences too that comes with a shifted sleep schedule.

A while ago I wrote a Twitter thread on how I have to viscerally experience consequences to learn. Overall, I think I may finally be learning this lesson for sleep.

Also note: it takes like 2 hours for me to get from the “time to get ready for bed” phase to actually sleeping. This means I should start getting ready for bed around 10.

— Categorized under: #sleep, #productivity

The Mechanism of Dreams

I didn't feel inclined to consume media yesterday but consumed some anyways to move away from CBD. Had another long, drawn out dream last night, completely unrelated to the media I consumed yesterday. It was about doing a small river boat tour with some friends.

One thing I noticed with CBD-induced sleep is that there are no dreams. Perhaps this makes sense to some degree, media consumption & life experiences often leads to dreams for me, and I have a feeling that I'm waking up early prior to CBD because there is a part that looks for narratives and didn't find any. This either leads to discomfort or a faulty algorithm that causes me to wake up.

CBD-induced sleep feels like it skips this altogether. There's a sort of dizziness that CBD creates that makes my thinking process fuzzy and induces artificial tiredness. For some reason I get no dreams on it. It's something I didn't notice until I started dreaming again. I wonder if these vivid dreams from the past few days have been me finally processing that backlog of dreams. It certainly explains the complete lack of interest in narratives recently, and the intensity of these dreams.

Dreams as Guardian Angels

My favorite function of dreams have been their guardian functions. I've had quite a few dreams that does one of 1.) warn me against a future threat, 2.) prepare me for grief, and 3.) indicate to me when I am currently stressed. I find 1.) and 2.) particularly salient. There are times when I unconsciously gravitate toward life decisions that probably won't work out in the end, and dreams have sometimes been ways to bounce myself out of that. I'm pretty thankful for it. I think that this is another good reason to skip on CBD.

The Prolonged Aesthetics State

One thing I notice when I fall low on sleep is that aesthetic things (particularly music) become much more salient to me. I can't help but stop what I'm doing to appreciate music. This is distracting but also fun, I guess a part of life in that sense.

Sometimes I wonder if music is a way for me to make up narrative content, but this seems untrue. Music consumption does not improve sleep for me, and you would think that with the lack of dreams on CBD music would have become less salient for me, but they've become more.

What music DOES correlate with is the lack of cardio. I find that not running increases my artistic sensitivity & perfectionism tendencies (e.g. OCD). Along that veins, it might even increase anxiety. Music are particularly aesthetically beautiful things and may appeal to my heightened artistic sensitivity at that state.

Is not running good for my creative process? It does improve quality in detail-oriented work, but I think it may be bad for creative thinking. At least in non-artistic realms of my life, I find that not running causes me to fixate on unimportant life decisions.

These are my notes on CBD and sleep currently. I may have some more to write, but a part of me also wants to summarize some thoughts about social interactions yesterday, so perhaps I'll write more about dreams later.

— Categorized under: #dreams, #sleep, #productivity