FIRE Aethernaut, Mr. Fate, ventures deep into the nocturnal dreamlands to explore and reveal the true nightmares of early retirement!
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” – EA Poe
I’M LIVING IN A NIGHTMARE ZONE
Prior to early retirement, I lived the, perhaps, not-so-glamorous life of a highfalutin executive working in excess of 60 hours per week whilst physically traveling across four time zones three times a month for the better part of a couple of decades. Needless to say the perpetual motion of it all, and attempting to attain a semblance of restorative slumber in an unfamiliar hotel bed or in a plane 35,000 feet above the planet, made achieving a consistent state of restfulness neigh impossible.
At best, I slept exceedingly poorly with my body always attempting to adjust from a time zone a couple of days in the past while now being in an entirely different one today. It was a never-ending and unsuccessful game of catch up. The fatigue of travel on top of the demands of my job virtually guaranteed a fitful night with only a few hours of “quality” sleep.
Moreover, the cumulative effect of the physical and mental stress manifested itself in severe night terrors where I would yelp, shriek and thrash about as if in the throes of some half-assed demonic possession. While I rarely, if ever, remembered these wild nocturnal convulsions, Mrs. Fate and, embarrassingly, some hotel room neighbors sure did. Nevertheless, I figured all this was de rigueur for the professional life I had chosen and knew, ultimately, it would all come to an end once I stopped working, so I just dealt with it.
I NEED TO SLEEP, I NEED TO DREAM
In the months leading to my retirement, I earnestly began to think about if and how my “natural” sleep patterns would emerge in an environment where I could exclusively govern when I went to bed and awoke, particularly without any work-related demands or stressors. I was soon to find out!
It would be inaccurate to claim that I had a decisive plan as to how I would approach my post-retirement sleep habits. I just figured I’d sleep when I was tired and wake when I wasn’t and embrace the splendid sublimity of the “every day is Saturday” that my life had recently become. That said, I’m rather naturally inclined to routine, even given a total absence of structure, so I was close to my prior pattern of falling asleep around 10ish in the evening and waking up at 5ish in the morning. Slowly, I began to sleep later and finding myself falling asleep around 9:30 and getting up at 6:30, which has continued to be the norm since.
Frankly, I was kind of surprised that about 9 hours of sleep each day is what my body, in a totally non-scheduled, “all natural” environment, seems to gravitate toward for optimal operating performance. I’ve also noticed that 30 minutes more or less has a deleterious effect on said performance and I feel over or under-slept throughout the day.
Aside from the quantitative aspect of sleeping more, there was a profound difference in the qualitative aspects as well. I now sleep deeply and soundly while the night terrors and diabolic contortions have effectively been altogether obviated. This occurred almost immediately after I stopped working and killed the ridiculous travel. While I was pretty sure that was the primary driver for all that nonsense, within a month I was absolutely certain of it.
SWEET DREAMS AREN’T MADE OF THIS
So, as one can plainly see, without all this work stuff and being decidedly under-committed in my new life, I was finally sleeping well and long. After all those years of required routine that, to a large extent, determined my patterns, my body could finally settle in and was now full of a vim and vigor I’d previously never experienced. That is, until I started to notice something else beginning to make an appearance in the tranquil fields of my nocturnal dreamlands – nightmares!
To be fair, I can’t, in all candor, classify these strange dreams as what most of us would consider a garden variety nightmare infused with extreme dread and horror, but they were exceptionally peculiar to me. I refer to them as “work flashbacks” and they started about a month after retirement and have continued to occur about 4 times per week. I use the term flashback relatively loosely as it’s not as if it is a recurring scene, like being late for a meeting, missing a plane or delivering a presentation in only my boxers. It’s more akin to a series of individual vignettes or “splashes of memory” that approximate those I previously experienced, but not quite. They are generally routine and benign in nature, but have comprised nearly all of my dream-related content in excess of a year.
After a while, I became curious enough about what may be going on that I made yet another trek to the local university’s science library to do me some digging around on dreams and dream theory.
I’LL SLEEPWALK ON YOUR BALANCE BEAM
Even before digging in, I was well aware of the older, now largely passe, psychoanalytic dream theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung from my undergraduate studies. I have generally rejected Freud because, frankly, I consider his whole theory to be nothing other than a personal, cocaine-fueled projection of his own repressed longings and sexual desires into the realm of psychology. My esteem for Jung is far higher as I feel his approach to dream theory is on much more solid footing. His position that dreams allow us to reflect on our working selves and solve problems or think through issues is far more palatable. That said, I was far more interested in exploring the non-psychoanalytic, more physiological approaches. Enter modern dream theory. Initially pioneered by Hobson & McCarley, these dudes posit the notion that dreams are basically random electrical brain impulses that pull traces of stored experience from one’s memory. Their model known as activation-synthesis hypothesis, claims that the brain is working hard, particularly during REM sleep, desperately trying to make some sort of sense and meaning out of these random signals. Why? As Hobson suggested, “The brain is so inexorably bent upon the quest for meaning that it attributes and even creates meaning when there is little or none in the data it is asked to process.”
Newer research by whip-smart folks like Dr. Erin Wamsley from the Harvard Medical School advance the action-synthesis model presents compelling evidence that dreaming is influenced by the consolidation of memory during sleep and that “following encoding, memory traces are gradually stabilized and reorganized into a more permanent form of long-term storage.” Her article is a captivating albeit challenging read, but it helped me greatly to understand what’s been going on in my head at night for the past year.
CLEANSE, FOLD & MANIPULATE
So, in essence, what seems to have been occurring is that most nights my mind is taking all of these work-related “memory shards” tidying them up and popping them into long-term storage. I imagine since there’s a good 25 years worth of memories there, it has taken, and will continue to take, a goodly while for all of it to get cleansed, folded and neatly filed away. Or than again I may have it all wrong and, as Freud would suggest, I have deeply repressed and unfulfilled longings to return to work. Or maybe I’m just nuts. In any event, as per usual, I’m going with the evidence-based scholarly research on this one.
HOW ABOUT YOU?
To be certain, this dream/memory consolidation thing is something I both had never anticipated nor even heard other FIRE bloggers mention, let alone discuss. Nevertheless, I am very interested to hear if any other post-FIRE folk have experienced something even remotely similar, as I would like to hear your story. Again, maybe it’s just me. All in all, I’d like to think that the packing of all these old work memories into long-term storage is simply a way my brain is creating more space for the magic and new adventures in the years ahead!
*AUTHOR’S PARTING NOTE
I realize that some readers may feel hornswoggled by the duplicitous nature of my intentional clickbait title. If this is you, fear not, as I have already written about the sundry FUBAR aspects of my early retirement, so click here to get your schadenfreude on!