February Dream Journal Summary

Posted on March 2, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

Here is the summary of my dream journal from February’s 30 day life experiment of getting 8 hours of sleep per night and keeping a consistent dream journal. I missed one day throughout the month because I didn’t immediately write down the dream after I woke up and I subsequently forgot about it. All of the others were incredibly vivid and worth remembering. Who knows, you may find yourself as a character in one of these dreams. Enjoy:

I highly recommend trying to keep a dream journal as a life experiment. It’s really fun to look back at all of them to see all the wacky places that my subconscious takes me to while I’m asleep. Now that I’m back in the habit, I’m hoping to keep it going.

February Recap: 8 Hours/Night + Dream Journal

Posted on March 1, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

There’s something about the urban environment and lack of sleep that seem to go well together. There’s always something to do and always something to work on and think about. I’ve always been a morning person, but moving to Boston has also made me a night person. I’ve found that late nights and early mornings are not the best combination. This month’s challenge came at a point in my life where I was sleeping on average 6 hours/night or less. Really I’ve just been trying to absorb as much life as I can after work, four or five hours at night during the week just isn’t enough time. I was consistently overtired, drinking roughly a liter of coffee per day, and not performing my best both at work and on the weekends athletically.

Going into this month’s life experiment I thought the hardest thing would be to put myself to bed. It turned out that the issue was a little more complex than that. The struggle typically had to do with other people, not myself, putting myself to bed was easy. Several nights involved me leaving a friend’s house early, leaving the bar early, or cutting the conversation short so that I could get to bed by 10:30 (which I’ve learned is not appreciated by girlfriends). Chances are, your buddies or your significant other is not going to accept, “Sorry, I have to go to sleep so I can get a full 8 hours” as an excuse for not hanging out or not talking. However, I made a goal to myself that I would start taking care of my sleeping habits this month and that is what I did. As a result I actually feel fantastic but it definitely took a concerted effort.

I got in the habit of sleeping a full 8 hours, then when my alarm went off in the morning, I snoozed it for 15 minutes more, and then had no problem waking up on the 2nd alarm. My morning wakeup before this month went something like this: annoying preset alarm on my cellphone goes off, I respond “Argh F*$K”, and I start the day angry. This month I felt significantly better starting my day knowing and feeling that I had a full nights rest, I highly recommend it despite what your friends think of you. I’m still not sure that 8 hours is the magic number, but that’s not the point, the point is that I hadn’t been taking care of my health and I made a conscious effort to slow down and take care of myself.

The other goal of this month was to rekindle a practice I started in high school but let drop off during engineering school; keeping a dream journal. I have some pretty wild dreams and so I’ve wanted to get into the habit of writing them down again but just haven’t done it. This month has refocused that effort and the result has been pretty awesome.

Like a good engineer I analyzed my dreams by putting them into nine different categories just to see what patterns emerged. 45% of my dreams involved work in some capacity which is a bit unfortunate considering for me, work is work, do it 9-5 and leave it there. So I wasn’t happy to see that it followed me into my dreams. A great example of this was my post on “Where are my Adventure Dreams?“ I hate to waste a perfectly nice night of dreams on something work related.

Fortunately, the majority of my dreams involved adventures. I spend most of my week planning trips for the weekend so naturally, adventure is on my mind daily if not almost hourly. Close to 60% of my dreams involved adventure (sometimes work and adventure, but that would be an ideal situation wouldn’t it?). A few of my favorite adventure dreams were “Muslims in Nepal“, “Avalanches“, and “Biking Across the USA” because they involved world travel, big mountains, snow, and learning about myself.

Another area I looked at was WHO was in my dreams. More often than not, my dream was filled with strangers (45% of dreams), nebulous dream characters who I simply interacted with throughout the dream. 20% of my dreams involved me being alone the entire time, 15% involved my girlfriend, and 20% involved friends from real life. It’s interesting that the majority of my dreams involved people I didn’t know, I wonder why that is and what it says about my subconscious.

Lastly, I also rated my dreams as realistic or wildly unrealistic and unfortunately, the realistic dreams won 55% to 45%. Given the choice, I’d rather have my dreams be so outrageously unrealistic that I would wake up to my alarm clock saying, “Wow that was incredible” versus “Hmm that was totally normal”. Normal is for real life, adventure and unreal scenarios are for your dream life. A few of my favorite unrealistic dreams were, “Underwater Battle with Megatron“, “Basement Technology and Unicorn Blankets“, and “X-Men Taking Over My Brain“.

I highly recommend keeping a dream journal, it’s not hard to start that habit. Simply keep either your laptop or a notebook/pen right next to your bed and while you’re still groggy in the morning write down your dreams before they escape your mind. I’ve found that the more I do this, not only does it become easier to remember your dreams, you tend to have more intense and detailed dreams. The ultimate goal would be to dream lucidly (i.e. control your dream life) but that is harder to come by and can take years of effort. It’s really fun to look back at your dreams. I went through my dream journal from high school with Sarah and it was crazy to see some of the things my sleeping mind was creating.

As with all of my life experiments thus far, the goal has been to lead an examined life (Yvon Chouinard founder of Patagonia) through making a concerted effort for 30days to relook at how I live my life and challenge myself to live differently. I’ve seen the results of my 30day life experiments filter into the rest of my daily life as new habits and ways of living. I’m hoping that sleeping well and keeping a dream journal follows suit and becomes standard practice moving forward.

Weekend Adventure #3 – Gulf Hagas, Bob Dylan, and Mount Katahdin

Posted on August 23, 2011 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

If you’ve been paying attention you’ll realize that I didn’t write a post for Weekend Adventure #2. It was actually pretty easy to live without trash so I’ll briefly summarize. I went to Martha’s Vinyard, bandited a 5k, and hung out at a friend’s house sampling various microbrewed beers and delicious smoked meats. Most everyone had a pretty good buzz going so I’m sure it didn’t seem odd that I ate all my food with my fingers instead of using the provided plastic plates and utensils. No big deal. Also, we recycled all our beer bottles and I packed out what little composting material I ended up with. Largely uneventful on the no-landfill front. Now for Weekend Adventure #3…

I traveled up to Maine with some friends to hike Gulf Hagas (Saturday) and Mount Katahdin (Sunday). We first stopped at a gas station just outside of Boston to fill up the cah and get some road snacks. However, their front sign was a little misleading:

: “On the Run: Fast, Fresh, and Friendly”… NOT

The only true part about their marketing slogan was that they were fast (as all convenient stores should by definition I suppose). There was absolutely nothing in the store that was fresh (not surprised but why the false advertising?). Literally everything was individually wrapped in plastic so I had to forego the snacks to avoid the trash. Again, not surprised but why advertise “fresh”? Fresh compared to what?

We made a stop at LL Bean along the way to return a pair of my girlfriend’s boots that were falling apart. Fun Fact: LL Bean will allow you to return any piece of their gear for any reason forever. I am on my 3rd pair of the same boots and I only paid for the first ones (so far I’m down to $40 for each pair of boots). They were the first company in the U.S. to have a warranty policy #ReasonsIloveMaine.

Obligatory photo of the giant boot outside the store

Due to their extremely favorable return policy, I did some investigating into their recycling policy. They categorize returned products with a 1, 2, or a 3 based off the condition they are in when returned. Here is the breakdown; 1 = goes right back on the shelf, 2 = goes to the outlet store or the employee store, and 3 = trash?!

RIP Boots

The boots that were returned had soles that were falling apart (left them by the fire, i.e. user failure not product failure but the warranty holds just the same) and they were just thrown away. I think LL Bean should work with TerraCycle on recycling or upcycling some of their products, just a thought. They could eliminate waste and have money donated to charity, only adding to their already stellar customer satisfaction, a win-win situation in my opinion.

The next day we drove to Katahdin Ironworks to hike Gulf Hagas, aka the Grand Canyon of the East. It was an 8 mile loop that followed a beautiful gorge for 4-5 miles, plenty of great lookouts and places to go swimming.

One of the many views along the Gulf Hagas Rim Trail

I made the mistake of bringing the heaviest Tupperware I own (pyrex), not the best idea when backpacking. The rest of my pack was super light anyway so it wasn’t a huge deal.. I also had previously bought a large bag of trailmix from Shaw’s which came in a recyclable ziplock bag. The bag said “Please Recycle” with a recycle sign on the back however it did not include the number (1-7). I am not sure how the recycling center will know how to sort it once I “recycle” it. I’ll recycle it anyway but I’m skeptical that it won’t end up as trash in the end.

Saturday night we managed to get free tickets to see Bob Dylan (long story). I was super hungry once we got inside the show but I couldn’t get food because every vendor used Styrofoam or something similarly wasteful. Also, water was $5 so I opted out of that option simply on financial principle not necessarily environmental principle but both reasons were valid.

Bob Dylan and Leon Russell on the Bangor Waterfront. Waterfront Concerts, Bangor, ME

On Sunday we got up at 4am to hike Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Again I rocked the pyrex dish with 2 PB&J’s, Shaw’s Trailmix, 3L of water in my camelback, and a thermos of Tim Horton’s coffee for the ride up.

En route from Baxter Peak to Pamola Peak via Knife's Edge approx. 1 hour before a thunderstorm

On our way back in Millinocket I saw this sign at another convenient store where I couldn’t buy anything except Pig’s Ear Jerky (literally the ear of a pig, thanks Millinocket but no thanks).

The sign shows a Dasani waterbottle that is made of 30% plant material and still recyclable. Decent concept but in my opinion this is like putting lipstick on a pig, at face value it might make it look good but deep down it’s still a pig. America uses 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes, whether or not they are made of plants is still incredibly wasteful, ugh.

On the way through Bangor we stopped by Dysarts, a fantastic truck stop just off I-95.

BTW, if you know what Dysart's is then we are immediately friends.

I ordered a plate of poutine (french canadian gravy/cheese fries) and a hamburger. My eyes were definitely bigger than my stomach and despite running a massive calorie deficit I had plenty to take home for lunch the next day. Let’s just say that left-over poutine is pretty nasty, or as my brother says, “Leftover poutine is wasted poutine”, wise little brother. I reheated it the next day and ate it anyway, not so good the 2nd time around.

I took home food in my own Pyrex container as well as a #6 polystyrene (Styrofoam) to-go box, bummer. I guess I should have ordered only enough food that I could consume in one sitting, but that would have been hugely unAmerican of me right?

I thought I was going to have to bring home all my fruit (apple cores and banana peels) but I remembered that my parents started composting a few years ago, good work guys:

Lastly, I have a confession to make. At breakfast on Saturday before Gulf Hagas I accidentally threw out four egg shells. I didn’t remember until we were on the trail and by then they were long gone on their way to the landfill. Egg shell fail.