Oh man, I just survived a night filled with intense, bloody, disturbing nightmares...I can remember having one every three hours... ... I should never sleep on an empty stomach...The only good thing about the nightmares is that they were lucid. It's rare that I'm aware that I'm dreaming, but all night, I could occasionally see my sleeping body in the dream, and whenever the nightmares became too out of control, I woke up on command. Weirder still, I always felt like I had some control, but never full control.

I remember one of the last dreams in vague detail...I think I was a creature of immense power and I was in a cave, turning people to stone out of some intense feeling of grief and then shattering the stone...In another dream, I had to follow the Devil into Hell and fight him. I followed this long tunnel downward into this cavern filled with ancient constructions and drainways with lavaflows...There were these round red fishlike creatures that were floating in the air. By choice, I explored a structure that had within a kitchen that looked like it hadn't been tended to in years, feeling at every instant like I was in a horror movie and that something dark was going to jump out at me at any minute. All the while, I kept seeing my sleeping form and reminding myself that I could wake up if the dream got too bad, but I felt compelled to remain asleep to continue the story.

The last part I remember best. I was in a car driving outside the city, although the car appeared to be driving itself. There were seven or eight planes in the air above me, and I was trying to shoot them out of the sky (and failing). Then it occurred to me that the planes were intended to escort me somewhere. Suddenly an unseen force took hold of my car and it started to take off, like a plane. At once, I panicked, and before the car was more than 12 feet off the ground I hastily called up the image of my sleeping form and began shouting at it to wake up. And I did wake up.

I've heard that some people don't like to eat before going to bed, that the brain activity when the lower brain is sending impulses to the stomach to digest the food results in bad dreams...with me it is the exact opposite. I can barely get to sleep if I don't have a full stomach when I go to bed, and when I do sleep, I've nightmares. Not just nightmares, but intensely vivid ones in which things just seem more real.

I don't eat before I go to bed, gives me bad heartburn and wakes me up in the middle of the night.

Wow! I'm gonna try going to bed hungry tonight, though I probably won't really have a choice.