Analyze This

You know those people that over analyze things, I’m one of those people.

“Hi, my name is Claudia and I’m an overANALyzer.”

It’s true, ask all my friends. It comes in handy sometimes. For example, when it comes to math, I can rock at it. It makes sense in my mind, I’m no “Beautiful Mind” and see geometric shapes form before me when I stare at someone’s tie.

“OMG! cos^2x – sin2x / cos^2x + sinxcosx = 1- tanx…well that’s easy…let me look into the sky and I’ll have an answer for you.  Well that’s  2=tan x!”

No, it’s not like that, I just get it and I can determine what the answer can be by process of elimination because I’ve already analyzed what it CAN’T be.

Same with software. I just get it, before I even dive into it and start working with it, I’ve mentally noted mistakes I could possibly make and figure out how not to make them. Or if I’m working on a project that has certain steps, I analyze three ways of doing it (a, b and c) and end up using the most efficient, fail-proof method.

When I walk into a room, I can mentally tell you how to rearrange it so there’s more “walking room” without having to rearrange and move the furniture 3 or 4 times. I’m not saying it’s going to be decoratively appealing, but people taller then me enjoy the extra leg room, yanno?

I’m super good at reading people and I can tell if someone is happy, uncomfortable, smart, introverted…etc…just by meeting with them in the first 5 minutes and asking a couple of questions. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as we all know. “I love that shirt you’re wearing.” (Note to self, no eye contact, can’t take a compliment, quietly said thank you and robotically adjusted shirt.)

If a friend comes to me with a problem wondering what to do, I can come up with a handful of scenarios of what they can do and the outcome from doing that to help them better decide what they should do under certain circumstances.

The only thing that I can’t do is predict things. When I see a problem, I want to solve it. But with life in general, you can’t predict what people are going to do or how they’re going to react because people are not A + B equals C. They’re driven by different emotions and thoughts and you just never know. So when I’m stressing out or worrying about someone/thing or me and I don’t know what’s going to happen, my stress rolls over into my sleep.

I’ve been known to have full length conversations while sleeping because my mind won’t shut down and rest and is overanalyzing whatever I’m worrying about. I dream every day. I’ve gone to a sleep clinic and it’s pretty much one of those, “Well Miss De La Garza, yeah..you’re a dreamer alright.” Yeah, thanks doc. My mind is always thinking, processing, analyzing…you name it. I’m pretty good at remembering my dreams as well and correlating them with events that have occurred in the past couple of days or weeks. Like for example, if I dream an orange, I know it’s probably because I went to the store and bought apples and I’ll remember the oranges were right next to the apples.

I’ve been known to have continuous dreams. I’ll be asleep dreaming and then I’ll wake up and 2 days later when I go back to bed the dream kind of picks up where it left off. Sleep doctor said that’s not at all uncommon. It’s probably more like the reader/writer in me that’s kind of plotting it out and so then I dream it since I have a pretty vivid imagination.

See, what you end up dreaming about at night has something to do with things your subconscious picks up when you’re awake. Maybe a face in the crowd or a color, maybe something on your to do list or a picture you saw hanging at the mall. So when you’re asleep, subconsciously you release that and you end up having an entire scenario wrapped over this one little thing.

The thing about my dreams is that they’re usually never really nightmares. I’ve only dream I was falling once in my life, and that was back in JHS. But lately, I’ve been dreaming reptiles and bugs and spiders. Which, to some of you crawly thing lovers, might not be a big deal, but omg, it just freaks me out. I dream I had this huge dead snake in a tank and it gave birth to billions of tiny slithering snakes and I was lighting them on fire with a torch because they were all over my room and I had to kill them.

I dream that one of my friends (i’m not saying who) called me to tell me her brother was engaged then I heard a scream and it was because her brother was burning in a car right next to her apparently he had suddenly gotten in a car wreck right outside her house. (i also dream i’d write run on sentences. )

Seriously, some messed up dreams that make me wake up wondering, WTH!

I mean, nothing stressful is happening to me right now and I couldn’t put two and two together until this morning. I was working on a retouching project and I just worked through the night so I ended up going to bed this morning after I ran some errands and ate breakfast (lol, so healthy, huh?). I knocked out at about 8a.m.ish and slept like a baby. I wondered when I woke up, why I slept only dreaming of retouching eye catch lights instead of having some morbid dream like I had been all week long.

Turns out, it’s because of my new stupid obsession. Yes, i jumped on the Twilight bandwagon. See what happens to you when you follow the crowd (well…”a” crowd). I didn’t get to read my two chapters I usually do before I head to bed and wallah…slept like a baby.

Yeah, Twilight gives me nightmares…who would have thunk it!

I’ll probably end up dreaming tarantulas and nasty worms or something tonight.  I’m almost finished and I can’t just leave the book there sitting staring at me, WANTING ME TO READ IT.  That’s no fun.