The sandman slipped me something.

Last night I had the oddest sleeping experience in my recent memory. I'm in the habit of going to bed fairly early these days, 9:30-10:00pm-ish, on account of the working at 6:30am every weekday. Last night was no different starting out; in bed by 10 to 10, asleep minutes afterwards (yay for exhausting physical labour, no lying restlessly awake for this boy). Anyhow, my understanding of sleep is that on average males my age need about 5-6 hours of Slow-Wave-Sleep before reaching REM, or dream sleep. I find this to be pretty accurate with me, as I only seem to remember dreaming at all if I get at least 6 or 7 hours of sleep. Less than that, and it's just a black night. Anyhow, I did get to dreaming, but it was the oddest sort of feeling I've ever had whilst doing so. It was what I'll have to call 'half-lucid'. I was somewhat aware that I was dreaming, but there was an atypical "dullness" to the sensation... lucid dreaming is usually quite a rush for me. Anyhow, I ended up doing exactly what I always do, without fail, when I go lucid, which is fly around. When this starts working really well, I usually end up getting excited, my heart rate increases, and it wakes me up. But, thanks to this odd dullness, everything felt more relaxed, more normal, and I did not wake. The landscape was probably best described as southern British Columbia and the Canadian Shield mixed. Lots of birch and Douglas Firs, yadda yadda. I landed on this little piece of land where this medieval blacksmith seemed to be working on a few things. I spoke with him for a while, and then for some reason I was roused from sleep, but not too jarringly. I looked over at my alarm clock... it was only 2:20am! I have no idea why I was dreaming so early in the night, but I think the dullness -might- have something to do with the fact that I was dreaming from within a deeper type of sleep. A little more unconscious, if you will. Anyhow, I slipped back to sleep, and the dream continued (another rarity for me... they don't usually resume. In fact, I can't remember a single instance of a dream picking up right where it left off in the same night). I can't remember a great deal of it anymore, after a full day of work, but it maintained that half-lucid feeling, until I woke up 2 minutes before my alarm clock. That was a plus, because I got to shut the damn thing off and contemplate the experience for a couple minutes instead of being shocked out of sleep by scratchy radio. I noticed that I didn't exactly feel rested, and my heart was definitely beating more rapidly than it usually is first thing in the morning. I woke up a couple of times during the dreaming, once around 3:30am and then again shortly after 5am, and finally at 5:43 for the last time. I guess I had been dreaming off and on for over at least 3 hours. Lots of things happened, event after event, a couple of shifts in focus, periodic increases in lucidity. It was crazy. I felt a little off, like I'd just been running around in my head for the last 3 hours, but it didn't take me long to get my bearings, and the day turned out to be great. I had lots of energy and a calm that hasn't visited me in a while. I wish I could remember more of the specific events of the dreams but I thought that the This-World portions of the experience were worth noting down.