I get nightmares sometimes when I'm sober but I literally cant remember ANY dreams when I'm high all the time... I know they still happen because sometimes I wake up with the inkling or sensations left over from a dream, but i can't remember it at all, and that can be super frustrating for me. I do a lot of hardcore dreaming... like serious tripped out transcendental stuff sometimes... and when I can't tap into any of that at all it starts to get super-depressing to wake up in the morning because i just feel like I am continuing the day before without any real respite.
I am just a lazy ass stoner... and I have a lot of health issues in history that encouraged a sedentary way of life so now it's kind of hard for me to keep myself active sometimes... and the laziness the weed invokes just doesn't help at all... I would rather get up and sit around getting high all morning than go for a run, if I have the option. But I am recalibrating myself into someone who does both, like you said.
And yeah, if nothing else the breaks really ease up on my wallet/usage... nothing like four months off to keep your stash growing.
Though I admit I kind of recoil after and smoke like a chimney so I don't even know if it's ag ood idea to push my breaks so long. Sometimes I think I'd be a lot better off doing shorter breaks, IF I could just keep my hands off the buds in between! But my thing is, I like smoking so much, that when I come off a break I go into ultra-consume mode like a slingshot... heh.
I want to get into a more casual relationship with pot, where I can break tolerance every week and get really high every week... or would even settle for just getting high in the evenings, if I had that much self control... but it always ends up an all day affair... lol.
But as it is now, I just try to go easy on myself with the judgement stuff when it comes to smoking heavy... and then I take a break when I feel like I have overtaxed myself too much. This works for me well enough. Believe it or not, it's really not very hard for me to stay sober after the first, oh, three days...