johnguinness's Diaryland Diary
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drugged/brainwashed dream part 2?
You know better than anyone how boring and repetitive my life is, especially since I'm away from school and the gym and a lot of social interaction. So even though I've just gotten up, you get today's entry, mostly about a dream, but with a tiny similarity to my waking life.
Yesterday I got in my new bottles of Remember!, from a different store than usual. I can always sense changes when I take it. As far as the outcome, I generally say that when I'm on that, my brain and memory function at a decent level, even if maybe I don't have access to some memories where I haven't made new connections since the crash. Add in Sam-e, and I'm able to laugh out loud occasionally if I see a really funny scene, and I back off on despair a bit. On the rare occasions that I also have FRS Plus to drink, I get the mental energy to not just think of things I should do, but get up off the couch and do some of them. I have four and a half years of being off and on the two things, maybe a year or two with Sam-e. But it's predictable when I layer them that way.
A few hours after I took the Remember! yesterday, I could feel the change in my head. It's like there's a bunch of activity up there. You know how sometimes your thoughts are going a mile a minute, maybe after a night out where you interacted with a lot of people, and your brain is trying to process everything that happened, so you either can't sleep, or can't focus on anything? This felt like that, but without the thoughts, or actually feeling anxious about anything.
It almost seemed like a bonus ingredient or formula change in the supplement, but last night I chalked it up to drinking three cans of Diet Pepsi out of the case I bought on sale. My head still feels that way this morning.
I haven't slept well for ages, because of the half a mattress, and various other factors I won't get into. But it's nothing for me to wake up fifty or more times during the night. So it's kind of rare lately for me to get well into a detailed dream that I can remember lately. But there was one this morning that I'm pretty sure was a continuation, or a revisiting, of one I had before. And I recall having a couple of entries here that did include dreams, and it feels like maybe I could track down this one if I paged back to earlier in the year.
I think there were earlier bits, but I'll start where it seemed to get important. I was in a city. I'd just been to an event, and walked up to the car I was using. It was an open parking lot, with a few trees, a bit uphill from where I'd been. I went to unlock the car, but when I patted myself down looking for the keys, I realized that my pockets were empty - no keys or wallet. But I didn't understand how I'd been able to get through wherever I'd just been with no wallet or money. Then there was a bit of a delay - I don't know if I woke up a bit or what, but I was still at the car, and my old friend was there, I guess to help me out. He lived in the same small town that he really did when he was in high school. Anyway, we talked for a bit, and then he said something about his car and driver. I reacted to that - why on Earth would he have a car and driver - and that was a mistake, because the conversation had been a test, and I shouldn't have known that he wouldn't have had a C & D in the world I knew. There had been a bit somewhere in there about me planning to go back to the hotel to ask if they'd found my keys and wallet in my room.
The next thing I knew, I was in a room with other people. I was sedated to the point of being barely conscious, but trying to fight for a bit of, what, clarity? I couldn't see the people, but my Mom was alive, and she was right next to me, in a similar state of druggedness and despair as everyone around us. I told her to keep fighting, because I was going to get us out of there, and she asked how, with the doubtful voice of someone who had given up all hope, and I said, "I've been making notes".
That's when I realized that this wasn't a fresh dream - that there had been more before, and even though I was in a state here where I seemed to have been awake, I knew it was important, so I was able to force the dream a bit further along. That happened, however, and I was still drugged, but on the move, and all I could see was the tops of a bunch of large test tubes in a lab, all with some light blue liquid. There was a bit of reaction as I passed by there, but I got to a corridor, and there was another patient who kind of caught me for a minute of conversation. He looked and sounded like the Doc from Back To the Future. He'd been there a long time - in a different section from mine, but had been a patient so long that he was the equivalent o a trustee in a prison. He told me that patients called the place we were in The Dungeon, and that I was the only one who had ever survived the treatment or drug or whatever. That conversation had only taken a few seconds, and I moved a bit further up the hall, and there was a men's room. I realized that it was the place I didn't go in, but realized that had been the place in a previous dream, or a deja vu during this dream, where I had gone during the moments I was able to beat the drugs and have a moment of clarity, and I'd jot myself a quick note while in one of the stalls, before they medicated me again.
I forced myself to lie there this morning and repeat all the details to myself so I'd remember. There was another familiar bit about a street, and some shops, and kids, and people in line to buy food from one of them. I'm not sure when or how that fit in, but they weren't real life, but part of the illusion.
Fun times. In real life, I heard back from the Polar guy, he did get my HRM fixed for free, and it went in the mail yesterday. I had addressed the package to him like he'd instructed, and enclosed the e-mail telling me it would be free, so it's a shame that something happened to have someone send me an invoice, and I had to react to them trying to charge me fifty bucks. I've been leery of the near-freezing mornings, but the watch should be here by the weekend, and I'm ready to try pre-dawn walks again.
My right heel still feels iffy, and I'm not sure that wearing flat fencing shoes with no arch support or cushioning is the way forward just now. A few months after I got fired, once I'd passed a couple of dire financial months and had both unemployment benefits, I went on a spending spree of things that might help me recover. A guy at a running shoe site gave me a code worth some percentage off an already great price, so I ordered like four great pairs of running shoes, and the best pair of cross trainers I've ever seen.
I guess it was the following August when I sold pretty much everything from the spree on eBay to get money for rent and food to keep me alive between loans. I sold all the shoes, still with tags, except the one pair I had worn outside for a few minutes. I've kept them on a shelf, promising myself that I could wear them once I got down to my pre-crash weight. I got kind of c;lose to that last Fall, but then had the fall, and the drives to get my sister to and from the hospital that messed up my knee again, and the leaky mattress that de-railed everything else, so I'm far off again now. If I get the watch Friday, then on Saturday I'll try on the shoes, and hopefully wear them for my walking comeback. There's no more important time than right now.
8:17 a.m. - Thursday, Apr. 07, 2011
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