Bloghaustion

I would blog, I really would, except that I'm just all blogged out.

You may argue that my blog output hasn't been that significant recently, and that I really have no good excuse for not cranking out more. And I--generally speaking--would agree.

But if you could have been with me in my dreams last night, you'd know precisely how exhausting my blog life really is.

First, a bit of history. Between the ages of 18-23, I was employed by a major pharmaceutical company as a (some of you won't believe this, and the rest of you won't know what I'm talking about) keypunch operator. That's right. Someone whose entire working life is reduced to a right-handed relationship with the numerals zero through nine. Someone whose mind is rewired, against the very laws of God and nature, to automatically see "15-362-11-48" when the words on the order clearly read "48 bottles of Dilantin 50 mg, 1000 per bottle."

Someone who knows without thinking that if the order says "Dilantin with Phenobarbital" instead of plain old Dilantin, she darned well better change that "362" to "365" or there will be heck to pay with the big boss.

I spent nights and weekends memorizing five thousand such stock numbers, never realizing until the task was accomplished that not only had no other employee ever managed to do such a thing, no other had ever been asked.

Needless to say, I ate, drank, and slept pharmaceutical stock numbers. I keypunched my way through five years of dreams, somehow bizarrely attaching stock numbers to all the words I attempted to process while asleep. All night every night for eons, I pictured the five fingers on my non-dominant hand flying over those keys.

No wonder they called me "Crazy Fingers McKenna."

Last year, when I wrote my first novel, all my dreams were processed through the filter of a computer keyboard. If, in my dream, my husband said, "I love you," I saw my fingers typing out the words "I love you" while hearing his voice.

Last night, I awakened every fifteen minutes or so, after not falling asleep at all until two. Each time I opened my eyes, I realized that the little dream scene I'd just created had "appeared" as a post on my blog. Then I'd fall asleep again, and the next sequence would be added to fallible as another new post. In four hours, I composed sixteen new entries on fallible.

You'd be tired, too, if you were me.

Do you have any regular activities, like typing or blogging or being late for class or not studying for finals, through which your dreams struggle to be born? Or is it just me?

Posted by Katy on 04/26/05 at 06:27 PM

Fallible Comments...

That's fascinating, Katy. I've never seen myself typing my dream scene and dialogue. I wonder what Freud would do with that. ;o)

I still have dreams in which I can't find my locker at high school, don't know the combination if I find it, and I'm already late to take the final in a class I never remembered to attend all semester. And I'm naked.

I don't have this dream as often as I used to , but I graduated from HS almost 30 years ago. My kids have all graduated now, too. Maybe by the time my grandkids finish, I'll get this out of my system. :o)
-----
Posted by Jeanne Damoff on 04/27/05 at 03:45 PM
Since I do most of my sleeping (which totals about 2-3 hours nightly) on the couch with the television on, my dreams usually include whatever characters or people are on the TV at the time I fall asleep. For instance, last night I put myself into the Forsensic Files episode, and was dreaming that I was the person that was found dead. The other night I was a part of the MASH 4007 gang in the operating room. It certainly makes for some interesting dreams.
Posted by Bridget on 04/27/05 at 04:02 PM
I have the same locker dreams as Jeanne does, but I'm not naked. Sometimes I'm in PJs or underwear. I also dream that I'm going to an exam I should have studied for but didn't and I'm late and can't find the right room.

I graduated from high school in 1974!
Posted by Sabine on 04/27/05 at 04:30 PM
This same thing happens to me when I play too much Tetris. There's a technical term for it, I think... Hold on... Yeah, read this:
- http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0001F172-55DA-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21&ref=sciam

I'm sure it applies to blogging as well.
Posted by timsamoff on 04/27/05 at 06:28 PM
One of my recent dreams- i'm in a room and there are five bundles of scattered diapers & one crying baby. each diaper was unwrapped and full of poop that really stank. i went and collected each one, wrapped them up, and carried them over to the trashcan while i tried not to get annoyed by the crying baby. finally as i dumped the diapers into the trashcan, i threw up too. pretty gross dream!!! and yet so vivid :P

I really love babies & spend time with church friend's babies every single week. But i think recently, i've been quite stressed about feeling obligated to babysit or feeling bad for saying no when someone asks me to take care of their baby, especially the babies i live with. Learning my boundaries... :P
Posted by jane on 04/27/05 at 09:07 PM
I started dreaming and thinking in "typing" when I first began journalism school. I did so much on a keyboard that even when I talked I would imagine everything in qwerty. It was surreal. Doesn't happen so much anymore. You must really be exhausted and stressed. How's Mom doing?
Posted by Paula on 04/27/05 at 11:53 PM
Hey, Sabine. I'm not always naked. It varies. And I often can't find the room for the exam, either. I think HS must be an extremely stressful time in life for these dreams to pursue us so long!

I have a baby dream, but not quite like Jane's. In mine I forgot I had this baby, and I can't remember the last time I changed it or fed it or did anything for it, and yet when I rush in to check on the baby, it's fine.

I have good dreams, too, though! :)
Posted by Jeanne Damoff on 04/28/05 at 01:44 AM
Jeanne--I rarely dream of trains going through tunnels, so Freud would probably discount my keyboarding fixation as unimportant.. :) Aren't the high school dreams just so weird? I think until I was 30, I still occasionally dreamed of showing up without my homework in the FIRST GRADE and disappointing my beloved Sr. Sheila Ann. I get little enough REM sleep as it is--if I appeared naked in my dreams, I'd wake myself up REALLY fast! Tee, hee.

Bridget--I didn't know you were sleeping even less than I am!! How awful! Being on MASH sounds like a lot of fun, though...Tell me again, why are you sleeping on the couch? To keep your neck and back from getting jostled?

Tim--Wow! Fascinating article--thanks! I've never played games like Tetris with any regularity, but I feel positive that I would dream in Tetris if I did. When I used to do a lot of calligraphy, I dreamed in itallics--truly. The article said that Tetris players who dreamed it became better players IF they got REM sleep. Too bad I get no REM--maybe I could become a better novelist in my sleep!

Sabine--My high school dream is much like yours. Unfortunately, my pajamas and underwear aren't much to look at, either...I graduated in '72, but recent "traumas" finally seem to be supplanting the high school traumas in my dreams.

Jane--I'm no Freud, but it sounds like you might be a bit overwhelmed by the baby obligations you've taken on! I've got to say, though, that diaper dream is freakin' hilarious! Having raised 3 kids to adulthood, I don't think I've ever had a dream like that...but I'm not sure why not!

Paula--So I'm not alone in the typing thing! Yes, I've gone through periods of typing all my words in my head when awake, too. It's a good thing I'm a pretty fast typist, since I talk really fast! The blog dreaming night was a bit of a fluke, since my stress level has been down for a number of weeks now. I'd even slept WELL every night for a week until that off night--the first good rest I've had in YEARS. Mom is having a pretty good run of things right now. We went to the doc yesterday, and she had almost no complaints for him. So I'm trying to enjoy this time while it lasts! :)
Posted by Katy Raymond on 04/28/05 at 03:08 AM
Wow - it's nice to hear of someone else who dreams things through their typing/keyboarding (or other small-motor-skill) type actions, I've never heard anyone be able to put into words how that works, and it's nice to know I'm not alone.

I had a part-time job doing keypunch data-entry during college, plus I had to key-punch and batch run my first programs in programming classes, so I logged quite a few hours at those old keypunch machines in those days... I'd don't remember them specifically, but I'm sure I had similar dreams during that time!
Posted by Chris(tine) on 04/28/05 at 04:50 AM
I'm always dreaming that I've left my nanny charges somewhere unattended or that I've done something terrible to them which somehow makes sense in the dream. Once I dreamt that Jack wouldn't stop touching things that I told him not to, so I removed his fingers. It didn't hurt him in the dream--he just didn't have any fingers left to, you know, touch things with. Near the end of the dream I began to panic, realizing that his mom might not agree with my decision to remove his fingers. I woke up feeling relieved that it was just a dream, but also horrified that my mind would come up with such things.
Posted by Mary on 04/28/05 at 02:22 PM
My meds keep me awake a lot of the time, or make me tired at weird hours of the day. Jim can't sleep without me, so he falls asleep on one couch about 11pm, when I'm still wide awake. When I finally do drift off (on the other couch), it's the middle of the night and almost time for the alarm to wake me up again.
Posted by Bridget on 04/28/05 at 03:03 PM
I usually sleep through the night until about 4am. For some reason I just wake up every morning around this time and struggle to fall back to sleep. This is when I usually have thought creep into my head (maybe that's why I can't sleep?). These thoughts usually concern my life and what I can do to make it better (all around). I'll try to remember specifics next time and I'll be back to share. Thanks for the reading material.
Posted by Matt on 01/07/11 at 03:08 PM

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Personal blog of christian writer & fallible mom Katy McKenna Raymond in Kansas City, Missouri Katy is represented by Greg Johnson at WordServe Literary Read more Katy at LateBoomer.net Follow Katy on Twitter Follow Katy on Facebook 123 Recent Posts Try Becoming Brenda Starr Off Beat Scattered That’s It So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What? The Spoon Sciatica Sweetheart A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices. As with everything in life, balance is key. Slow down, you move too fast… Yeah, I know. I have issues. Search Advanced Search Syndicate Login E me at katy @ ngenius.com	Bloghaustion I would blog, I really would, except that I'm just all blogged out. You may argue that my blog output hasn't been that significant recently, and that I really have no good excuse for not cranking out more. And I--generally speaking--would agree. But if you could have been with me in my dreams last night, you'd know precisely how exhausting my blog life really is. First, a bit of history. Between the ages of 18-23, I was employed by a major pharmaceutical company as a (some of you won't believe this, and the rest of you won't know what I'm talking about) keypunch operator. That's right. Someone whose entire working life is reduced to a right-handed relationship with the numerals zero through nine. Someone whose mind is rewired, against the very laws of God and nature, to automatically see "15-362-11-48" when the words on the order clearly read "48 bottles of Dilantin 50 mg, 1000 per bottle." Someone who knows without thinking that if the order says "Dilantin with Phenobarbital" instead of plain old Dilantin, she darned well better change that "362" to "365" or there will be heck to pay with the big boss. I spent nights and weekends memorizing five thousand such stock numbers, never realizing until the task was accomplished that not only had no other employee ever managed to do such a thing, no other had ever been asked. Needless to say, I ate, drank, and slept pharmaceutical stock numbers. I keypunched my way through five years of dreams, somehow bizarrely attaching stock numbers to all the words I attempted to process while asleep. All night every night for eons, I pictured the five fingers on my non-dominant hand flying over those keys. No wonder they called me "Crazy Fingers McKenna." Last year, when I wrote my first novel, all my dreams were processed through the filter of a computer keyboard. If, in my dream, my husband said, "I love you," I saw my fingers typing out the words "I love you" while hearing his voice. Last night, I awakened every fifteen minutes or so, after not falling asleep at all until two. Each time I opened my eyes, I realized that the little dream scene I'd just created had "appeared" as a post on my blog. Then I'd fall asleep again, and the next sequence would be added to fallible as another new post. In four hours, I composed sixteen new entries on fallible. You'd be tired, too, if you were me. Do you have any regular activities, like typing or blogging or being late for class or not studying for finals, through which your dreams struggle to be born? Or is it just me? Posted by Katy on 04/26/05 at 06:27 PM Fallible Comments... That's fascinating, Katy. I've never seen myself typing my dream scene and dialogue. I wonder what Freud would do with that. ;o) I still have dreams in which I can't find my locker at high school, don't know the combination if I find it, and I'm already late to take the final in a class I never remembered to attend all semester. And I'm naked. I don't have this dream as often as I used to , but I graduated from HS almost 30 years ago. My kids have all graduated now, too. Maybe by the time my grandkids finish, I'll get this out of my system. :o) ----- Posted by Jeanne Damoff on 04/27/05 at 03:45 PM Since I do most of my sleeping (which totals about 2-3 hours nightly) on the couch with the television on, my dreams usually include whatever characters or people are on the TV at the time I fall asleep. For instance, last night I put myself into the Forsensic Files episode, and was dreaming that I was the person that was found dead. The other night I was a part of the MASH 4007 gang in the operating room. It certainly makes for some interesting dreams. Posted by Bridget on 04/27/05 at 04:02 PM I have the same locker dreams as Jeanne does, but I'm not naked. Sometimes I'm in PJs or underwear. I also dream that I'm going to an exam I should have studied for but didn't and I'm late and can't find the right room. I graduated from high school in 1974! Posted by Sabine on 04/27/05 at 04:30 PM This same thing happens to me when I play too much Tetris. There's a technical term for it, I think... Hold on... Yeah, read this: - http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0001F172-55DA-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21&ref=sciam I'm sure it applies to blogging as well. Posted by timsamoff on 04/27/05 at 06:28 PM One of my recent dreams- i'm in a room and there are five bundles of scattered diapers & one crying baby. each diaper was unwrapped and full of poop that really stank. i went and collected each one, wrapped them up, and carried them over to the trashcan while i tried not to get annoyed by the crying baby. finally as i dumped the diapers into the trashcan, i threw up too. pretty gross dream!!! and yet so vivid :P I really love babies & spend time with church friend's babies every single week. But i think recently, i've been quite stressed about feeling obligated to babysit or feeling bad for saying no when someone asks me to take care of their baby, especially the babies i live with. Learning my boundaries... :P Posted by jane on 04/27/05 at 09:07 PM I started dreaming and thinking in "typing" when I first began journalism school. I did so much on a keyboard that even when I talked I would imagine everything in qwerty. It was surreal. Doesn't happen so much anymore. You must really be exhausted and stressed. How's Mom doing? Posted by Paula on 04/27/05 at 11:53 PM Hey, Sabine. I'm not always naked. It varies. And I often can't find the room for the exam, either. I think HS must be an extremely stressful time in life for these dreams to pursue us so long! I have a baby dream, but not quite like Jane's. In mine I forgot I had this baby, and I can't remember the last time I changed it or fed it or did anything for it, and yet when I rush in to check on the baby, it's fine. I have good dreams, too, though! :) Posted by Jeanne Damoff on 04/28/05 at 01:44 AM Jeanne--I rarely dream of trains going through tunnels, so Freud would probably discount my keyboarding fixation as unimportant.. :) Aren't the high school dreams just so weird? I think until I was 30, I still occasionally dreamed of showing up without my homework in the FIRST GRADE and disappointing my beloved Sr. Sheila Ann. I get little enough REM sleep as it is--if I appeared naked in my dreams, I'd wake myself up REALLY fast! Tee, hee. Bridget--I didn't know you were sleeping even less than I am!! How awful! Being on MASH sounds like a lot of fun, though...Tell me again, why are you sleeping on the couch? To keep your neck and back from getting jostled? Tim--Wow! Fascinating article--thanks! I've never played games like Tetris with any regularity, but I feel positive that I would dream in Tetris if I did. When I used to do a lot of calligraphy, I dreamed in itallics--truly. The article said that Tetris players who dreamed it became better players IF they got REM sleep. Too bad I get no REM--maybe I could become a better novelist in my sleep! Sabine--My high school dream is much like yours. Unfortunately, my pajamas and underwear aren't much to look at, either...I graduated in '72, but recent "traumas" finally seem to be supplanting the high school traumas in my dreams. Jane--I'm no Freud, but it sounds like you might be a bit overwhelmed by the baby obligations you've taken on! I've got to say, though, that diaper dream is freakin' hilarious! Having raised 3 kids to adulthood, I don't think I've ever had a dream like that...but I'm not sure why not! Paula--So I'm not alone in the typing thing! Yes, I've gone through periods of typing all my words in my head when awake, too. It's a good thing I'm a pretty fast typist, since I talk really fast! The blog dreaming night was a bit of a fluke, since my stress level has been down for a number of weeks now. I'd even slept WELL every night for a week until that off night--the first good rest I've had in YEARS. Mom is having a pretty good run of things right now. We went to the doc yesterday, and she had almost no complaints for him. So I'm trying to enjoy this time while it lasts! :) Posted by Katy Raymond on 04/28/05 at 03:08 AM Wow - it's nice to hear of someone else who dreams things through their typing/keyboarding (or other small-motor-skill) type actions, I've never heard anyone be able to put into words how that works, and it's nice to know I'm not alone. I had a part-time job doing keypunch data-entry during college, plus I had to key-punch and batch run my first programs in programming classes, so I logged quite a few hours at those old keypunch machines in those days... I'd don't remember them specifically, but I'm sure I had similar dreams during that time! Posted by Chris(tine) on 04/28/05 at 04:50 AM I'm always dreaming that I've left my nanny charges somewhere unattended or that I've done something terrible to them which somehow makes sense in the dream. Once I dreamt that Jack wouldn't stop touching things that I told him not to, so I removed his fingers. It didn't hurt him in the dream--he just didn't have any fingers left to, you know, touch things with. Near the end of the dream I began to panic, realizing that his mom might not agree with my decision to remove his fingers. I woke up feeling relieved that it was just a dream, but also horrified that my mind would come up with such things. Posted by Mary on 04/28/05 at 02:22 PM My meds keep me awake a lot of the time, or make me tired at weird hours of the day. Jim can't sleep without me, so he falls asleep on one couch about 11pm, when I'm still wide awake. When I finally do drift off (on the other couch), it's the middle of the night and almost time for the alarm to wake me up again. Posted by Bridget on 04/28/05 at 03:03 PM I usually sleep through the night until about 4am. For some reason I just wake up every morning around this time and struggle to fall back to sleep. This is when I usually have thought creep into my head (maybe that's why I can't sleep?). These thoughts usually concern my life and what I can do to make it better (all around). I'll try to remember specifics next time and I'll be back to share. Thanks for the reading material. Posted by Matt on 01/07/11 at 03:08 PM Page 1 of 1 pages Commenting is not available in this weblog entry. Next entry: Somehow, We'll Get Through This Together... Previous entry: Cleansing << Back to main


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Personal blog of christianwriter & fallible momKaty McKenna Raymondin Kansas City, Missouri

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Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri