Memory full.

No matter how advanced computers get, we still find ways to fill them up with so much running crap that they wind up lagging and lollygagging. Then we have to get new computers that can run that crap properly, until we fill them up again. 

Unfortunately this is not an option with my brain, which resists all upgrades. 

During the stressful period in which I am slogging, I have found my dreams to be unreasonably detailed. Not clever or smart, but loaded with data. I might be traveling down a quiet road and find myself without warning in a rural neighborhood; the neighborhood is fully populated with people and their dogs, and I'm invited to have a look at someone's vast library (of course I can read none of the titles but the books are in all kinds of colors and conditions). Or I am trying to ride the subway along with enough people to make up the cast of Ghandi, and every grotty detail is visible but not the stations or where we're going. 

All this leaves me as tired when I wake up as when I went to sleep. I'm running new software on my old hardware, you see, and something has to slow down somewhere. 

Why do we go through all these mental gymnastics anyway, when all we want is rest? These days most scientists from which I've heard think that the purpose of dreaming has to do with learning and memory, a way of sorting out the data. It's possible, but my dreams seldom deal with anything in my life at present. I dream about commuting more that you'd think possible, and I haven't had to do that in years. Still, who really knows? 

Compounding the riddle of dreaming is that we smarty-pants humans are not the only ones who do it. We know for certain that dogs dream, always running with li'l paws or boofing out barks in their sleep. It's really cute. Less cute is that, according to a piece in the Smithsonian, lots of animals are dreaming: 

Young jumping spiders dangle by a thread through the night, in a box, in a lab. Every so often, their legs curl and their spinnerets twitch—and the retinas of their eyes, visible through their translucent exoskeletons, shift back and forth.

“What these spiders are doing seems to be resembling—very closely—REM sleep,” says Daniela Rößler, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. 

I feel worse for knowing that spiders dream. ABOUT WHAT? 

The article does note that we still don't know dreaming is about, whether we're man, dog, bug, or eucalyptus plant. (NB: Nothing about dreaming vegetables in that article.) It's mysterious, and it wears me out.  

I'm with the late great Mitch Hedberg on this topic: 

Dreaming is work, you know - there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord. I want a dream of me watching myself sleep.

Right on, sleepy brother.