Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

According to a recent New York Times article, people who keep dream diaries will typically report  1-2 nightmares per month, but I myself cannot honestly remember the last time I had a nightmare that would fit the formal definition used in the article.  I can’t recall being woken from sleep in fear.  I occasionally have dreams in which I slip and the jarring sensation of motion breaks the spell of sleep, but the feeling of fear doesn’t have the opportunity to enter into these experiences.  Indeed, even when I keep a dream journal, I rarely have what I would consider to be a bad dream.  There’s the occasional dream that includes minor discomfort or anxiety, but these are rare and mild.  I’m much more likely to have a dream that becomes bad after I awake as it has presented me with the image of something that I wish were true (though this usually seems to be incidental to the main thrust of the dream).

I would like to think that this suggests I’m especially well-adjusted and have few horrors lurking in the recesses of my mind, but I have reason to doubt that interpretation.  I’ve been through plenty of miserable experiences that could provide fuel for nightmares.  I’d like to imagine that my artistic work that confronts these memories makes it unnecessary for them to follow me into sleep, but the biographies of so many artists speak against that.   I also wonder if it might have something to do with my Asperger traits, though I don’t really have any evidence of that.  The only reason that even occurred to me is that women tend to have more nightmares than men, and women are also much less likely to be Aspies– which, of course, isn’t evidence.  It just planted the thought.

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