Writing By Laura

I had a sleep study done last night. Which involved going to a sleep study clinic and being hooked up to machines and spending the night there while technicians analyzed my sleep. The objective was to check if I had sleep apnea or another sleep disorder interrupting my sleep. Sleep disorders (apnea in particular) are quite common for people who have experienced a Traumatic Brain Injury.

Besides having to spend a night away from Selby (neither of us liked that) my time at the sleep clinic was pretty uneventful. However it got me thinking about sleep and sleep disorders and how they’ve been portrayed in pop culture.

Stay with me… don’t fall asleep as I list sleep as portrayed in pop culture!(In no particular order.)

1. Friends (Season 4, Episode 20): Joey on Friends snores and Chandler is annoyed.

2. Inception (2010)-

A movie written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Batman: Dark Knight, Memento) and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio plays a thief who steals information by infiltrating dreams or the subconscious. And my Hollywood Crush Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer, Looper) is also in this movie so I had plenty to dream about after seeing it.

3. The Golden Girls-

An episode where Blanche stays up to write the next great romance novel and hilarity ensues. My favorite scene is when a delirious Blanche sees a plastic bag full of egg yolks (Rose is saving them when she’s making a recipe that requires only egg whites… I think) and asks why there is a bag full of tiny suns.

4. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004)-

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play a couple that breaks up and employs the services of a company that will erase a person from your memory. The process occurs during a sleep/dream state. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for this film. It was such a creative concept that all the broken-hearted people of world wish was reality.

5. “Sleeping Beauty” (1959)-

Perhaps the first time sleep was portrayed in film that I saw as a child. The poor heroine is left sleeping until her prince comes and gives her the kiss of true love to wake her up. In looking this movie up for this blog post I saw reference to how feminists don’t appreciate this story and see Princess Aurora as someone lacking agency. While I hadn’t heard this before, it makes sense.

Other Sleep-Related Movies

Here are the also rans I thought of when compiling this list.

“Before I Go To Sleep” and “Doctor Sleep” are movies I haven’t seen but each deal with either sleep (or ironically) brain injury. “While You Were Sleeping” is the romantic comedy version of a coma that I saw years before my own coma. And “Sleepless In Seattle” is the romantic comedy version of insomnia and grief that is charming to watch even decades later.

In Summary

I will always be that person who relates everything they are experiencing back to pop culture. I know this about myself, and I’m okay with it! In fact it was this pop culture obsessed part of my personality that played movies in my head from memory when I was recovering from my accident and undergoing painful or tedious procedures. I still employ that tactic and probably always will.

Writing Update: Memoir

This past week flew by. I spent a lot of time working on a tedious craft project so I really didn’t make any headway on my memoir.