Vegas, baby!

I came to the realization a couple days ago that I don't have dreams anymore. It's been several months now since I've had one, which is kind of a good thing because I despised all of those bizarre recurring nightmares of a vampire playing "Moonlight Sonata" on a piano in an unlit hall. But I also miss all of my fun dreams, the ones where I'd smash floating bricks with my head and ride around on a dinosaur named Yoshi to the tune of "du-du-du-dudu-DU-du!"

Where all of my creative dreams have gone, I'm not sure. These days, I just go to bed, black out for six hours, then wake up. And that's it. Researchers have a name for this dreamless hell -- "orthodox sleep" -- which they define as "a recurring sleep state during which rapid eye movements do not occur and dreaming does not occur."

I've wondered why I've been nonstop orthodox sleeping for so long, and the easy answer was because of being so restless from sleeping on an air mattress for the past eight months, but now I think it's because of a different reason: I don't have enough fun.

Not only has work been really busy, it's been mundane. Even worse is the fact that although I rarely allow myself to stay much longer than 5 pm every day, I spend a lot of my time outside of work sitting on a couch, watching TV, eating Choco Tacos, thinking about... work. Living a life like that, how could anyone dream anything?

I'm bored of being boring, which is why my trip to Vegas tomorrow morning is coming with impeccable timing. Some people think that a "vacation" is relaxing on a beach all day, or going out into the woods and camping and fishing for hours. Me, I need to be poked, stimulated, bombarded. I need noise. I need people. I need blinking lights. Tacky signs. Crowds. Music.

Vegas, baby. Vegas.

I fly out early tomorrow morning for about a week, and I plan on drinking a whole lot of whiskey and playing a whole lot of blackjack.

Researchers also theorize that the purpose of dreams are to organize the events of the day, to essentially "clean up the brain's software." Who knows if this is really true, but someone once told me that the more active your day is, the more vivid your dreams become. My hope is that after a day or two of ringing slot machines and all-you-can-eat buffets and Bellagio fountain shows and crappy caricature artists, I will have been stimulated enough to have a decent dream. Take that, orthodox sleep!