I wear my FitBit all the time, including at night. It has a neat little feature for tracking sleep and heart rate along with steps, mileage and calorie burn. Every day, I check the previous night's sleep pattern. And overall, I'm getting just over seven and a half hours each night. The goal of course is eight hours, but that works. However, age has a funny way of it, because those 7+ hours are not all in a row. They're interrupted by bathroom dashes and let-the-dog-out's. And the usual tossing and turning that occur as well.
Because I've been wearing it nearly 2 years, there's a lot of data to digest. I know that I sleep better in winter than in summer. Part of the reason has to do with blankets. As a kid, my mom made me a hand made quilt. I'm not sure what was inside, but it was a heavy quilt. I like to think it "grounded" me -- or at the very least, held me in place so that I'd sleep. And in winter here, I put a good heavy blanket on my bed for that very same reason.
Have I mentioned I'm ready for this heat wave to end?? Hurry up, September!
I find that I can somewhat simulate winter sleeping by lowering my thermostat to 74 degrees (yes, for us in the desert, that can be quite chilly, we reach for a sweater or light jacket when it reaches 70. haha) Another thing that helps is I keep a squirt bottle of water nearby, soak my jammie shirt and hair, let the AC and the fan cool me down and I get another "chunk" of sleep.
But the one factor I haven't been able to control are dreams. I dream very vividly, I remember many of them, sometimes enough of them to be able to share. Last night, I dreamed I was in a BigBox store, and a crew of us were painting walls. One of the gals from my last store in Ohio was there, as was another gal from my first store in Ohio (odd to be dreaming of people I haven't seen in 10+ years!) We were laughing and joking, rolling paint on the walls. A quick break in the cafeteria and as we were leaving, a man with a gun in the far corner of the room stood up and hollered "Freeze!" The girls dashed out in front of me, I was slowed a bit because I was trying to close the glass doors when he fired. I heard the shot ring out as it hit the frame of the door. I ran fast, dashed into a bathroom. Waited until I heard some hollering, and slipped out quietly. The doors to outside were just across the foyer, and as I dashed out, there were stairs all the way to the street. The front of the building looked as if it were the steps to a fancy courthouse or something. I'm not sure what happened with the shooter, or who he really was, as that's when I woke up. *smh* Such crazy weird thoughts that tumble around in my crazy weird brain!
My FitBit showed that I was asleep for 3 hours, 14 minutes in this segment of my sleep, and with that amount, I should have felt quite rested this morning! But then again, dreams can make you feel very tired the next day, as if it had truly happened!
Of course, I like to try and figure out what a dream might mean:
- To dream that someone is shooting you with a gun suggests that you are experiencing some confrontation in your waking life. You feel victimized in a situation or that you are being targeted.
Of course, my question is this: Does it make a difference if you know the shooter? If you can identify the person?
- The colors in your dream of decorating are important and have various meanings. For example, if you are painting white walls then this shows how you can be pure and selfless. If the walls are painted in yellow, this represents self-pity. Decorating in blue means easy-going feelings. If you dream of decorating with paint rather than wallpaper, it usually means that things are going to become difficult with a close relative.
The source goes on about decorating or painting a house, furniture, yourself ... but doesn't mention anything about work related painting. It was baby blue paint ... does that mean I have easy going feelings about work??? I don't think so! And something going to become difficult with a close relative... well, duh, as I get older, so do my relatives and ... yeah, things get difficult with age!
So much for trying to have an overall interpretation. I can make several guesses as to the dream source and what it's trying to tell me. And I can tell you this for certain: If I'm ever involved in some kind of painting at work, you can be sure I won't be sticking around to see if this dream comes true!!! hahahaha
I've also quit focusing on a goal of 12k steps per day, and am actively watching how my FitBit tracks active minutes. You have to be engaged in your activity for more than 10 minutes for it to count anything toward that number. Mondays are always more active than any other day, but with changing that focus, Sadie and I head out each evening at 6pm for a long walk. It's a quick 10 minutes over to the park where I let Sadie run in the grass. Then it's back into her stroller and off we go for 1.4 miles, circling our neighborhood. I'm sure if any of the neighbors are like me, they have a nickname for folks if they don't know a real name. 
