High Speed Dreaming - November 27

Wow - where did the week go?  I didn't write all week and I am trying to write every day.  I would say it is weird but I was able to get outside and make videos every day this week - maybe that is my writing this week.  I was able to get some fun duck videos and more muskrats underwater.

But this post is about my dreams and I think I finally figured out why I wake up so exhausted every morning.  I dream at high speed.  It is like I am previewing video and skimming through it using my computer mouse to control the speed.  This is faster than playing it in high speed and allows me to skip through 10 minutes of no action video to find the 2 seconds of a muskrat swimming by or a snake coming out of a hole.  My dreaming may be an unanticipated and unwanted artifact of the way I record hard to video wildlife.  

If I want to record a snake in a hole, or a mouse running next to the wall, or a muskrat carrying food into its burrow, I typically set up my camera, hit record, walk away, and come back in an hour.  This gives the animal time to get use to the camera and then behave naturally.  Without "eyes" staring at it, the animal will often just go about its business.  This makes for extremely long videos with nothing moving in it until that 2 second burst of activity.  So when I am reviewing the video to see what I got, I swing the mouse cursor over the video and play it back at really high speed that really doesn't have a speed - sometimes it is slower and sometimes it is faster.  And when I spot something moving in the video, I go back and forth to figure out what it is.  This is how I dream.  And it is exhausting.

This type of video is highly successful - I am able to capture things that we talk about but rarely, if ever see.  That is my mind.  So I am going to embrace dreaming in high speed from now on and not let it frustrate me.  It might still be exhausting but at least I know I am capturing something special.