I do not sleep to dream

I linked to the Fiona Apple song a while ago (that video looks like it's been removed, but here's a link to a non-embeddable high-quality version), but I just realized today that I don't remember having any dreams lately. I go to bed lying on my right side, turn out the light, turn over onto my left side, and slip into unconsciousness. Five to six hours later, the opening notes of Lauren's song "45" (or, more often, the sound of the CD player spinning to life) wake me, two minutes before a much ruder alarm on my other clock radio sounds.

(Oh, how dumb of me. I keep forgetting about the magic of teh inter-tubes. Here's Lauren's video for "45":)


Not too long ago I was having some vivid and bizarre dreams. Not anymore. I remember nothing lately. Now, this either means that I am sleeping so soundly that I am not having those little moments of waking up that allow you to remember your dreams, or I am never entering the REM stage of sleep associated with dreams.

Whatever the cause, I am spending much of my days exhausted and on the edge of a hypnagogic state, which is really not a good thing when you're driving nearly seventy miles a day or sitting in hours of meetings or alone at a desk trying to extract some patterns out of an immense data flow. The first day I made the transition from my previous job - which required me to be on my feet and moving for twelve hours, sometimes without a break, in a bright and noisy and highly stimulating environment - to my more sedate and sedentary task of data collection and analysis in a fairly isolated office environment, my immediate reaction was to nearly nod off, despite the fact that the workday was only three hours old at the time. Perhaps the Seasonal Affective Disorder which had been held off by working in a whitespace has decided to hit me extra hard? Or perhaps the lack of stimulation - the sights, sounds, smells, and major and minor tasks associated with working on the production floor - has caused my body to lapse into torpor?

And is this state related to my newly-realized dreamlessness? And, if it is, is one the cause of the other? And if so, then which is the cause and which is the effect?