I Dreamed a Dream

As I have described twice in the past, it’s very uncommon to remember enough detail of my dreams to be able to describe them after I wake up. This past Monday, however, not only do I remember the dream, I know that, even more rarely, external circumstances influenced what I was dreaming about.

In the dream, I’m on a mobile phone call—a long one, like a conference call for a meeting. At some point during the call, my Apple Watch thumps my wrist notifying me of another call coming in, which I dismiss. Can’t leave the conference call. Just seconds after dismissing it, my watch thumps me again. This repeats ad nauseam. I know I can’t get off the current call, but someone is apparently super intent on reaching me. In my perception of time within the dream, this is going on for something like 20–30 minutes. Understandably, I’m getting so annoyed at the insistence of calls from this number I don’t recognize, I’m just about ready to take my watch off. (Why I didn’t think to just switch to do not disturb mode, who knows.)

Right about this time is when I wake up, at 5:38am, and within a couple seconds realize that my watch actually was thumping my wrist—my wake up alarm! Mind you, I don’t use an audible alert so as not to awaken my wife who sleeps much later than I do. The haptic thump has always been completely sufficient. Rare fluke in this instance that my brain wove the thumps into my dream instead of alerting me to wake up.

Perhaps what I find most fascinating is, as I said above, I had perceived 20–30 minutes of this incoming call thumping. In reality, my alarm (via haptic thumps) goes off at 5:30am. So that half hour of dream perception happened just in the space of eight minutes!