(photo by http://jilliancat.blogspot.com/)

It has been many years I have not had a good nights’ sleep. I am what you call, a DREAMER. I dream almost the whole night and 99% of the time I can recall what I dream about.

Some people say that dreams have some connection to the days’ event or something that is bothering our mind. However, my dreams vary in so many ways. It can be just a mere daily routine stuff all the way to dreaming about snakes, killing or running away from killers etc. The only “upside” about all this is that at times, I manage to continue my dream after perhaps a toilet break in the middle of the night.

Sometimes my dream feels so real that I get it mixed up with reality. For example, in my dream I had a conversation with someone. As my day goes by, I become confused whether I really had that conversation and had to ask that particular person.

I have tried a few ways to curb this problem such as sleeping earlier, scented oil, no action movies before sleep, reading a light book instead of watching TV, short and simple exercise before sleep, and many more but the closest I get is perhaps I have a better sleep by 0.001%.

All these dreaming episodes would not have bothered me if I could wake up refreshed every morning. But more than half of the time, I wake up feeling even more tired than the night before! And what is worse, at times I get headaches. It makes my whole day unbearable.

I know I am not the only one experiencing this, as there are many similar cases as mine out there. However, so far, I have not read of any solutions yet and even some suggests that it has something to do with depression. I do not think it is this serious, but it is driving me crazy.

I am wondering whether I should go to a sleep clinic but I do not know where in Malaysia has sleep clinic and worry about how much it will cost. I did however found one Sleep Study Center who mainly does research on Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) at KPJ Damansara Specialist Hospital. What do you think? Should I pursue this or not? Or are there any other ways that cost less?

For the past few weeks, I have been having the same type of conversation with my senior colleagues. We realised that lots of graduates nowadays are quite different from their time (and even my time....which makes me feel old..haha). The graduates nowadays seems to be quite picky in their career choices mostly based on salary and not the sake of gaining knowledge for better advancement in the future. They would prefer to go into big corporate firms or company that can pay the most rather than think about how it would help them later.

Take civil engineering as an example. As mentioned by a very senior engineer today, being in the construction engineering line pays more than being a consultant engineer. But graduates never think that the knowledge they would gain in the consultant line in the beginning of their career will make their job in future much easier even if they jump to another line of work (contractor or developer). This senior has many years of experience and worked with many contractors and developers before, but very rare he will get someone who knows the "design engineering" world which will make things much easier for everyone to understand.

Another difference with some fresh graduates today is that they "want it all". They want a nice car, they want their own place (rented of course) and they want to shop and dine like they have all the money in the world. I still recall how I started my first few years of work. I rented a small little bedroom which only fits my mattress and my fabric cupboard. And then I moved on the a bigger room but stayed with my husband (my then boyfriend). We gradually then rent a small apartment and just two years ago, we moved in to our home.

I recalled "complaining" about my salary maybe after about 3 years of working at my first job. But now I hear graduates complaining about their salary in less than a year to a year of working.

You can call me a jealous person, but all I can say now is time has changed.