I’ve always been the type of person that feels that anybody that is getting much over 6 hours of sleep is a big iris*. How much sleep does a person really need? Do you want to spend 1/3 of your life or more sleeping? 25% is all the sleep time you are getting out of me lifetime!

For the seventh straight day I’ve gotten close to 8 hours of sleep. This has not made me a well rested and content individual. On the contrary for 7 straight nights I’ve had very vivid dreams, the entire night. I would not say that they are weird dreams. One of the word orderings that escapes the mouths of others that annoys me the most is “Dude, (yes most of my friends start their sentences with the term ‘dude’ because they are surfers) I had the weirdest dream last night.” Almost all dreams are weird compared to our daily existence. For me to have a dream I considered weird in the context of the dream world, the dream would have to be completely mundane.

I would fall asleep and have a dream where I was making macaroni and cheese on the stove, while watching re-runs of Scrubs followed by The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. This would be weird, because every day that I don’t have a post computer mine social engagement, I go home and make and eat supper while watching re-runs of Scrubs, The Daily Show and The Colbert Reporton Comedy Central. It would also be weird because I hate macaroni and cheese. I even hate cheese and macaroni.

It is weird because I am not the type of person that usually remembers their dreams. I can literally go months without remembering a dream. That is the ideal situation for me. I can’t shut my brain off during my waking hours. Not really. If I am awake, I am thinking. I have problems shutting my brain off to go to sleep. I finally learned in the last few years that the best way for me to shut my brain down and fall into the sweet darkness of rest is to listen to talk radio. The banality of Michael Reagan or the Coast to Coast guy allows my brain to just shut off and give me a break from it.

I’m not a person completely devoid of dreams. I have one recurring dream that I thought would have gone away at least 5 years ago, but instead still waits to meet me in the night on occasion. I also on occasion have the dream that predicts the future. When I write that these dreams predict the future, I don’t mean they predict the future in the way John of Patmos, Nostradamus, or fortune cookies (I’m still waiting last fortune cookie fortune) predict the future. More in the way that I’ll be in a sometimes mundane event and have an overwhelming feeling of already having this experience and then I will realize that I dreamed this event a few days prior. While this phenomenon (although in actuality almost a statistical certainty rather than a coincidence or divination) did occur at least once last week, these are not the type of dreams I’ve been experiencing.

The dreams have been very vivid. The problem is that I’m not getting my vacation time from my brain. The problem is that I’m sleeping longer than I normally do and when I wake up, I’m more tired than I was when I went to sleep. Every morning I wake up and feel more tired than I did the day before.

So if my brain short circuits in the next few days and I do something stupid like get into performance art or buy a Kid Rock CD or eat at Happy Joe’s or watch CSI: Miami or read US Weekly it isn’t my fault. My brain has permanently shutdown.

*I recently learned that the President of the Central Iowa United Way receives $153,058 in compensation, so I’ve decided that I need to start my own charitable organization. My charitable organization is going to attempt to raise awareness about the toughness of the pansy and defame and humiliate the iris based on its feebleness. This new charity has yet to have a name.