By Ola Roks

Every night I lie down and close these eyes hoping I get to see more than just an empty black screen. Depending on the rigors of the day, some nights it comes easier to me than others.

“It,” refers to the memorable visceral dreamscape that warrants mention, one that evokes some feeling of enlightenment or fulfillment.

For the better part of this summer, each time I fell asleep, I traveled elsewhere and woke up tired as though I had spent the entire day doing hard physical labor. Tiresome as the dreams were, I could not be more ecstatic to go to bed every night, and see what this brain would come up with next.

Freud claimed dreams were sexual wanting in disguise, subliminal messages the brain was sending revealing the truest deepest darkest desires. Freud also liked to use blow as medicine.

I don’t think the lifestyle of the Western world allows for a good night’s rest. The deepest part of dreaming, or the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep occurs in 90 minute cycles several times over the course of a night. REM sleep takes up about 20% of total sleeping time, and not much is known about it. What is known is that people that interrupt REM sleep too frequently are at higher risk of becoming depressed.

The Western world’s 9 hours a day working, and average of 6 or 7 hours a night’s rest makes for a cruel joke against the immune system really. Factor in that a lot of people will carelessly leave their televisions turned on as they sleep, effectively brainwashing themselves with news updates, and bad infomercials - not really sleeping well at all having done so.

Oscillating light pixels can still be detected through the eyelids; the brain is shown as active if the television is on, even if you are asleep. Don’t you dare think that the voice of the Slap-cop guy wont carry into your subconscious while you sleep with the television blaring, because if it hasn’t already; it will.

Before the dreams this summer, I noticed I was fatigued without reason. The fatigue seemed inexplicable as my days were average, given the odd bender on a weekend, but nothing I was doing was out of the ordinary.

I awoke suddenly one night to the piercing sound of the television squealing and realized that for months I had been sleeping alone using the one remote control to power off the cable box. What I failed to notice was that the television remained on for the entire night, volume set at 14, and the noise I was hearing was just the empty signal feed. It was high pitched feedback that had been keeping me up all of that time.

The ex was always the one turning the television and then the cable box off at the end of the night, and suddenly being single and sleeping alone, I did not catch onto this little detail for months afterward.

Something clicked inside me and I stopped watching television before bed and just read books, or magazines, or wrote, or drew instead. I left the television for the living room and the bedroom was for thinking. It worked. I was rested and happy and no longer a drag to be around at work.

What changed the most were the dreamscapes. Once I removed the television, and just bombarded the brain with intellectual things, the dreams got better. It was as though my brain was thanking me by giving me motion-picture worthy sleeps night after night.