The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Here’s a life hack for you. If you can’t find anything worth watching at night on cable, Netflix or any of the other streaming services, try going to bed early and sleeping on your left side.

You might find that your crazy dreams are almost as entertaining as anything Hollywood producers can concoct.

This is not just a joke.

In recent times I’ve noticed that when I fall asleep on my left side — the side where the heart is – I often wake up from wild, vivid dreams in a sweat having heart palpitations. I had one this morning I want to tell you about, but first I decided to Google it to see if there was any medical literature backing up my new theory. Turns out there is.

Your Sleeping Position Affects What You Dream About More Than You Think

The way we sleep influences the way we dream, researchers say.

Back in 2004, a study first published in the journal Sleep and Hypnosis, involved 63 volunteers who were asked to sleep either on their left side or their right side. They were then asked to fill out a sleep quality survey upon waking. The survey covered dreams and nightmares, their vividness, and how the participants felt in the morning.

The researchers found that the left side group were far more likely to have nightmares. They report that 40.9 percent of the volunteers reported having disturbing dreams, compared with just 14.6 percent of those who slept on their right-hand side. The right side group were more likely to remember dreams involving feelings of relief or safety, but they also reported lower quality sleep overall.

While the study had its limitations — a small sample size and self-reported results — it does indicate that there could be a difference in dreaming depending on how you are lying in bed.

“Our preliminary observations indicate that dreaming and sleep quality are associated with underlying brain functions and may be affected by body posture,” concluded the researchers. “Future research also needs to show how individuals who are skillful in controlling their dreams by hypnotic manipulations or lucid dreaming change their dream process by intentionally changing their posture.”

I’ve been meaning to test this theory and record some of my dreams. Just now getting around to it.

For the record, for many years I’ve rejected any psychological analysis of dream research and purposely tried to forget my dreams. As an undergraduate in college 40 years ago, I wrote an “A” paper for a Psychology class on the interpretation of dreams, citing work by psychoanalysts Sigmund Friend and Carl Jung. But later quantitative research experience led me to dismiss this work as poppycock, like much of Freud’s research that seemed to blame most mental health problems on sex, in one form or another.

It’s not my purpose here to debate such social science research. I’m just interested in telling interesting stories. So here goes.

See if you spot any psychological issues here. As I recall, my first research paper on dreams concluded that their primary purpose seemed to be wish fulfillment. I don’t know the latest in that research, just thought it might be interesting to know that sleeping on your left side could lead to wild dreams. It’s pretty obvious that people who come up in your dreams most likely came up in recent conversations or memories, or maybe even the news.

October 1, 2021: Recorded Dream One

As I wake up between 6 and 7 a.m. Eastern Time, I’m reluctant to get up because in my dreams, I was on a major bar hopping trip around the country with the famous Rolling Stones writer Hunter S. Thompson and my old friend from Birmingham Wayne Perkins. You may recognize his name from his time playing with rock bands such as The Rolling Stones (see the credits on Black and Blue), Bob Marley and the Wailers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Leon Russell and the bluesman Lonnie Mack. He even gets a guitar credit on Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark,” and claimed in an interview with me many years back that they had a brief affair.

Many people from Birmingham may remember him as the lead guitar player and singer for the Crimson Tide band, which I write about some in my memoir. The group cut two records on Capitol in the late 1970s. He recently came up in conversation when the bass player of that band, J.J. Jackson, died in a hospital in Pell City. It was not exactly national news. They failed to get super rich and famous.

But I used to hang out with Wayne, and his brother Dale Perkins, a good bit back in the 1970s and early ’80s after Wayne was rejected as a full member of The Rolling Stones and came back to Birmingham after hanging out with Bob Marley in Jamaica for awhile.

The best I can recall the dream, I was hanging out with Wayne and Thompson at Woody Creek Tavern in Colorado. Thompson, the so-called Doctor of Gonzo Journalism, is dead now as you know. But that doesn’t mean he can’t live in your dreams. Don’t you sometimes dream you’re in the presence of dead folks?

But a funny thing happened in one of those dream phases we tend to have. Near the end as I was about to wake up, the other face did not look like Thompson. It was Neil Young. Go figure.

We were all having a pretty good time, and I was photographing the party and getting video footage of it all.

We ended up on some super fast lear jet like a Jeff Bezos rocket or something and making the rounds of bars in New York, including the Chelsea Hotel, then L.A., and San Francisco. We ended up in New Orleans, hanging out in the courtyard out back at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street, right next door to Jacques-Imo’s restaurant, where we hooked up with Britney Spears.

As you know she was recently freed by the courts from a financial conservancy with her dad. I don’t actually keep up with celebrity news much anymore, and you’ve got to figure she’s not nearly as hot as she used to be. But again, this is a dream.

I recall at first that Thompson, then Young, didn’t seem to know who I was and were a bit standoffish at first.

Until Wayne said, “Hey, that’s Cowboy.”

That was my childhood nickname. I was locally famous as a kid, and went by that name in my brief period as a drummer, sound engineer and manager in the music business. After I went back to college, cut my hair, studied journalism and went to work reporting for newspapers, I stopped using the nickname.

Everybody in the bar, in the dream, got really friendly and fun when Wayne said, “Cowboy’s a hell of a drummer. He’s a hell of a writer and photographer too.”

At that point Britney idled up to me and latched on to my arm. She looked right into my eyes, and kissed me on the lips.

As they got drunker and more stoned, I documented it all in pictures and video, getting a bit of a buzz myself. In the dream, people. This harkens back to the 1970s, when I came of age.

As much as I wanted to keep the party going to see what would happen next, I suffered a cramp in my right calf and had to get up and stretch.

At that point, I gave up on going back to sleep and going back into the dream. The sun was up and it was time to start the Kenyan coffee, and crank up the computer to check the news.

Maybe I’ll try the right side tonight to see what I see.

Have you ever had a similar experience?