Tag: dreams

Can’t Sleep

I’m in this really weird cycle where I alternate insomnia with narcolepsy. One night I’m out like a light, and sleep the whole night through, and am up before my alarm. Those mornings I am relatively full of energy.. Another night I toss and turn for hours before falling asleep, and then waking up late; sometimes i sleep in the whole day.

The strangest part is that doesn’t seem to correlate to my injection schedule. Last night I injected, but slept great and had good energy this morning. The Wednesday previous I spent the entire day in bed after a terrible night sleep.

To make it more complicated, my Dr took me of Ambien, as I was doing weird things in my sleep. The Ambien stuff. Pretty well documented at this point. So I’m scared to take it, in fear of what I will say in my sleep, do in my sleep, or not wake up when my sleep-talking wakes up O.

Two nights ago I gave up: I went on a full apartment search for Ambien. As I have not been taking it for several months O has expropriated my supply (as I suggested). But when I went looking for it, it wasn’t in any of the medicine cabinets, toiletry travel bags, or anything. I didn’t want to wake her up. I ended up taking more Klonopin and some Atarax and tossing and turning myself to sleep downstairs.

Sometime in the middle of the night, O came down to make sure I was okay. I was so disoriented, I couldn’t form complete sentences, and for an irrational/chemical reason was on the verge of tears. I tried to explain, but I only got out half sentences. And repeated those half sentences several times. Then stumbled off to the bathroom (nearly falling) and coming back and crashing out again. I worried that I freaked O out, but knew that she had seen this before from me. We talked about it in the morning, and I think I explained myself, in so much as my irrationality could be explained.

She showed me where she keeps her Ambien. On the bedstand, in a decorative metal jewelbox like container. It is both Vienna Seccessionist and Flower Power at the same time. And it is full of Ambien. I just took one. Well, half of one. Right before I started writing this.

I think I will go meditate for a few minutes, and try again

Bleeding Zeppelin

blood

I just woke up.  With a bloody nose and an irrational desire, no… need, to listen to Stairway to Heaven.

I found a quick mp3 that was so over-compressed it almost sounded like it was live.  It was kind of an amazing experience.

And I guess the lyrics are about life, power, death and choices, and “its not too late to change road you’re on.”  I realized that for probably the first time just now.  Because I haven’t really listened to the song since the last song of my last High School Dance.  Every dance ended with that wistful “and she’s buy-uy-uy-uy-uy-ing as stairway to hea vun.”

The Taste of Blood

It is 7:45 on Saturday morning, and I can’t get the taste of blood out of my mouth.  I had awful dreams last night, including a kid who had his classmates pee all over him, then set himself on fire (and died) all for a youtube video, my girlfriend calmly explaining that she had been sleeping with a 17 year old (but she had realized he wasn’t the one for her), and having to sit through an awful experimental noise music performance, and then blood.  Dreaming of blood.  Dreaming of drowning in blood.

I think that part of your brain that thinks “wait! this might be real!” kicked in.  It is the same one that kicks in when you are having a dream about peeing.  It kicked in, and i woke up coughing up blood.  It was dark in the room, but i could tell the darkness of the blood against the white tissue I rubbed against my mouth.

I have been having lesions in my nose for a couple of weeks.  They don’t heal, but they produce these hard angular scab crusts, which often dissolve when I neti.  It is raw and painful.  Hard to breath at times.  And quite noisy.

I spat out a lot of the blood into tissues, and held my nose where the blood was coming from.  The jagged scabs made it quite painful.  I filled five tissues with coughed up blood.  I ate cereal. And I still have the taste in my mouth.  I wonder how long I was bleeding before I woke up?

Inteferon Dreams

I restarted my IFN last night.  My mom arrived yesterday.  This is actually a coincidence.  But it was really nice to have her here while I tried to pretend i wasn’t nervous.  I can’t quite tell whether i was actually calm, or was in denail.  previously it was clearly denial, w/ a lot of pacing.  but today, after a week of meditating, and my mom’s comforting and distracting presence, i think i might actually have been somewhere in the middle.  close enough to the middle, that I don’t know.

I just woke up.  Its 7:30AM.  I have a headache.  I had the usual chills, though less fever than normal. woke at 4:30, and only kind of slept after that.

Clearly my unconscious was churning through the implications of restarting the IFN.  I had a series of dreams about IFN, science, and weakness.  One I only remember as me on a mountain bike, trying to climb a hill, and getting passed and yelled at: this is about the bully who rides in Prospect Park, and who yelled at me last time i rode there.  I remember one about camping with my mother in snow (she has car camped w/ me once or twice tops.)  But the best one was another naked school dream.

I was in the audience at the front of a lecture hall listening to a lecture on the immune system.  It was a young female professor.  She went through all of the obvious functions of the immune system, the lymph nodes, whats in blood, red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and some other stuff that i remember from my many bloodwork results (billyrubin, leukocytes, neutraphil, etc).  Then she talked about Interferons, which stimulate neutrophil?  I forget.  I was repeating the pseudo-high school science lesson i’ve gotten over the course of this process.  Things I never really knew.

Then the lecture happened again, except this time it was a song i knew.  But only kindof.  I was singing along to the lyrics to comfort myself, b/c at the same time it was the song, it was also the same immune system lecture.  The young co-eds to my left and right were indignant — I mean, I am tone deaf, and didn’t know half of the lyrics to whatever song it was.  One of them (on the left) said, “do you actually know this song?” in a tone that made it clear she was really saying “shut up asshole.”  When she got to the part about Inteferons, and the side effects of Interferon therapy, and listed them all, and talked about how hard it was, i said out loud “I have that.”  And I started crying.

At that moment, the class was dismissed, and the co-eds kind of dissappeared, but kind of registered their surprise and also disgust/fear of me. I get up, and realize that i’m only wearing a t-shirt.  chest is covered, but the choice bits are poking out the bottom (LOL).  as per usual with naked dreams, i’m not that embarrassed, just concerned about the difficulties it sets up.  I try to get out of the lecture hall, which actually is surrounded by an airport like structure, with big pillars, and caverns, but no gates or planes.

Somehow I realize that I’m supposed to teach the same class for the third time around.  I hear “well, if your such an expert, why don’t you just teach the class.”  I try to escape via the caverns in the edges of the building, while someone comes in singing with a choir from the entrance door, and makes their way to the dias at the front of the room.  They are singing an a capella motown/gospel song; all i could make out was the refrain: “Here comes the Doctor.  Here comes the Doctor.”

I escape to the outside (maybe i magically get pants, maybe not, i can’t remember.) The young co-ed on my right comes up to me on the path away from the big building and touches me with a big rolled up sheet of paper.  She offers it to me.  I open it.  It is that 2 foot by 3 foot size of paper that comes in pads and is used in classrooms in lieu of a chalkboard/whiteboard.  There are words on it written in in black whiteboard marker.  I don’t remember what it said.

I’m hungry now.  I’m starting to get some fever action.  Going to eat cereal and lie back down.

My brother is on a plane to San Dieigo

And I am now here by myself.

Before I went to sleep, we raised a toast with the leftover champagne from his Sunday party.  I had less than half a glass, but on top of the other drugs I am on, I was nearly immediately woozy.  I slept harder than I have in months.  I woke up in the middle of the night to turn off the fans, and walked into more than one wall or piece of furniture.  Very deep, heavily drugged sleep.

Today is the first transitional day to Fall.  Its not Fall yet, but it isn’t Summer anymore.  Last night I didn’t have to run the AC, and I even turned off the fans in the middle of the night and put on the duvet.

So this morning it is twice as quiet.  No S, no whirring air.

I woke up from a dream in which I was crying.  I was crying in the dream. I don’t think I was crying physically, though I woke up with all the emotions of crying.  The dream was an extended “I forgot to wear my clothes” dream.  As a teacher, these dreams happen to me.  Once I actually forgot my clothes, but that is a whole other story.  Usually I am not worried about being naked — I worry about the other people made uncomfortable by my nakedness. but this time I was worried, even though I did have underwear.

In the dream I got into an argument with my father about underwear — this make no sense, b/c it was a dream, but I think I was borrowing someone’s iPhone to watch a youtube video about underwear, and my father got angry because I he had ironed my underwear, and that was not enough, i had to go look at underwear too!  This, of course, makes no sense because my father doesn’t ever do my laundry, and i have never in my life had ironed underwear.  That might be fun.

Somehow we were all outside, surrounding a school bus.  I was in the bus.  Everyone was outside.  I cursed angrily and threw my housekeys at the front window, which made a small chip or crack in the window, and walked out of the bus.  The outside turned into the tightest bend in the street that I grew up on, and I started walking through tall grass in the direction of my parents house.  Crying.  I was in front, but I could feel the presence of my brother walking with me, to my left and a pace behind me.  Some other people, who might have been friends or might have been relatives broke off from the group and started walking behind me.  I was still crying in the dream.  Then I woke up.

I have a habit of having the most obvious dreams.  Really unsubtle…

On top of all this, I think I’m getting sick again

The good news is that I have started meditating again.  I’m going to a class w/ O.  Its Yoga, not the kind I did before.  But close enough.