sleep

Dear Miranda: Dream on

Posted on by Kyra Nelson

In response to Dear Kyra 1o books that changed my life

Dear Miranda,

Surprisingly, somewhere in the process of writing an undergraduate thesis on the importance of pleasure reading, I did in fact decide that reading is good for you. Go figure.

So, it’s almost 3am. Because I’m a bit of an insomniac, that’s why. Good thing I can nap tomorrow?

The good news is, when I do sleep I usually have some pretty messed up dreams. And who doesn’t love a crazy dream to keep them entertained while they sleep.

The other night I was dreaming that I was the leader of a rebellion force against this evil tyrant who could hypnotize people with his voice. Everyone in the rebellion would wear ear plugs and use sign language so he couldn’t hypnotize us. And I got to be the leader of the rebellion because I could make myself intangible, which was very handy for escaping all the time.

Also, this evil tyrant guy had a really hot son. I spent most of the dream assuming that Hot Guy was evil just like his father. But then I was holding this prison break (the evil tyrant had thrown Madison in prison for being my sister, so naturally, I was setting her free like a good sister. There were also this couple who were thrown in prison for playing the piano. I’m telling you, this tyrant was a JERK).

Anyway, I had gotten everybody out safely, and was staying behind to fight off all the guards when the Hot Guy showed up and told me that he would hold off the guards so I could escape (very chivalrous, despite the fact that the guards couldn’t actually capture me on account of the whole intangibility thing). I woke up just as I was about to go confront Hot Guy about why he hadn’t bothered to tell me sooner that he was actually a good guy. I’m pretty sure kissing him was also on the agenda, but it never happened on account of I had to wake up for stupid classes.

I also have a number of interesting recurring dreams. I have one where I get kidnapped in an airport. I have another in which I’m trying to find something in Grandma’s house, but there are all these secret passages and the walls keep moving around.

My favorite recurring dreams have involved learning how to fly. It started out as me playing a game of The Floor is Lava and I jumped from one couch to another, but instead of landing I just kind of hovered over the furniture. Progressively, through my dreams, I’ve learned that if I arch my shoulders back, I can fly higher. So I’ve actually gotten to be a pretty proficient flier in my dreams.

the_floor_is_lava

But my favorite dream of all time (in terms of how messed up it was): I got teleported into the future, where giant robots were keeping humans as pets. This one guy has secretly built a time machine without his robot overlord knowing. Then he kidnapped me from my time period because I had my doctorate in linguistics. But this guy was actually trying to get Dr. Kevin Nelson, who invented the robot’s tech originally. So basically he got the wrong Dr. K. Nelson. He also had a huge crush on me, but I wasn’t really into him due to the fact that he kidnapped me from home and got me stuck living in a cage where we had to use those tubes that they have in hamster cages to get from one room to another. Because the robots actually designed our homes/cages after hamster cages.

Bascially, dreams are really weird.

Love,

Kyra

P.S. The last time I played The Floor Is Lava, it was 3:30 in the morning. At a hostel in Scotland. And I almost died on an unsteady leg rest.

Finals Week: A Survivor’s Tale

Posted on by Kyra Nelson

I am only one of the countless students who have survived the horor known as finals week. And yet I will add my tale to what countless others have already tweeted and facebooked (we have verbed facebook, haven’t we?). Perhaps you’ve seen this lovely depiction that utilizes the awesomeness of polar bears to illustrate common feelings about finals week.

Yes. I got home from my last final today and slept for about two and a half hours. And then I lay in bed for about another hour, just because I didn’t want to move. What can I say except that I like cuddling with my stuffed animals Araynia and Archie way more than a text book. Anyway, I’m still in a recovery state, and not super capable of forming coherent paragraphs. Which means for this post we get to go bullet style. No rhyme or reason. Just stuff about finals week. Here we go!

  • I’m capable of coming up with some really, really bad mnemonic devices. I was studying with a friend, trying to memorize different symbols in the Book of Revelation. We were trying to think of a way to remember that the twelve gates represented the twelve tribes of Israel (as opposed to the twelve apostles). I suggested that since tribe and gate both have four letters it would be easy to remember. Yeah, tribe has five letters…
  • Sometimes bad mnemonics are actually more effective for remembering things. Laughing about my silly letter miscount was probably the most fun we had all evening, and therefor that was probably the most memorable thing we studied.
  • It’s really sad when laughing about that becomes the highlight of the evening.
  • I don’t normally get test anxiety. But I was so freaked out about one exam that I was having trouble sleeping the night before. In fact, during my tossing and turning I managed to be thrashing about so hard that I whacked my head on the wall. It’s ok though. Neither the thud of my head hitting the wall nor the moan that escaped my lips managed to wake my roommate up.
  • I can’t be completely sure, but I think the moan probably sounded more or less like what a dying wildebeest sounds like.
  • Probably I didn’t wake my roommate up because she wasn’t asleep in our room. She had fallen asleep in the living room while studying. Like so:

  • I frequently try to bribe myself with food. That’s how I convince myself to study.
  • I also tend to justify eating a lot more in general.
  • One night I was trying to bribe myself with food. I was planning to take a study break and get high on Koolaid before finishing my studying. I got home and was too tired to even make myself Koolaid.
  • Most of the funny things about finals week that I intended to blog about aren’t actually that funny now that I’ve gotten some sleep. That sort of you-had-to-be-there thing.
  • You know you’ve hit a bad point when doing dishes suddenly becomes a fun and anticipated break from studying.
  • I actually do kind of enjoy that camaraderie that comes from the shared misery of finals week.
  • Right now I’m procrastinating doing cleaning.
  • White boards make studying 47.3% more enjoyable.
  • Coloring is a great study break. Some people get really into and it and create lovely pictures like so:

  • Other people are like me. They intend to draw something nice, but are so beat up from finals they just end up scribbling anyway. Like so:

  • Quick, somebody analyze it so we can send it off to an abstract art museum.
  • There seems to end up being a lot of laughing about things that aren’t actually that funny during finals week.

To those of you still taking finals, best of luck. Meanwhile I’ll be enjoying my freedom. My mom asked if I was planning to do anything fun after finals. I responded, “Yes. I’m planning to not take finals.” At this point pretty much everything else is fun. My name is Kyra. And this is a true story.