Dream, a re-priming

It's 4:30 in the morning, and Michael just woke me up by removing my glasses, and de-booking me. Apparently I've been in the same position since I fell backward into my pillow, and haven't moved enough to disturb either book or glasses since. I woke with the sounds of chanting in my ears, and hear them still, as if they were all in the room with me now.

"I was at an event 26 miles from the sea with Bob and he let it slip that he had a pasty-faced red haired girlfriend who would be taking my place. They were horses not bikes. One blond man was going to take me away but he was gone when I had gathered my things for escape. "Is anybody left, is anybody left" they were all chanting and laughing and I ran through dirt and stones all the way to the water. I jumped in, got clean again. but there was nobody left. Bob followed me the whole way. I was barefoot and didn't think I could run that many miles. I tried him with knives, and axes, I even peed on their sleeping bags. They were all just laughing and chanting. I could smell the sea long before I got there, and my feet were bleeding"


When I wake I use my Facebook Status to record whatever shreds of dreams may be left before they evaporate. This one felt so important I had to wake all the way up to capture it, and even now I hear them droning "Is there anybody left? Is there anybody left?" while the dark-of-the-night coffee brews.

That dream woke me in distress, and is keeping me awake now because my headache didn't abate during the night, just gave me a leave of absence to visit sleep for a while. It was waiting for me when I rejoined consciousness. It hasn't gone anywhere. This is the first time I don't feel sick, like I may fall off the edge of the world, since the Neurologist gave me the Divalproex Sodium that has also been approved for migraine. 25mg. would be an appropriate beginning dose for an epileptic, and I was given 250mg. tablets. I don't understand. I don't have epilepsy, I don't have a migraine. The dream and coming down from two doses of that horrid medication broke through the wall around my writing, and here I sit, at the bottom of the wheel of houses, frantically trying to catch up.


I have been so very depressed since I returned from the Endocrinologist's office, after hearing "All your test results are normal." Not that I'm OK, per se, but that my tests show normal thyroid ranges. I broke down and cried, sobbed, de-constructed in that office where I've been treated for this disease since March. I feel worse than I ever have in my life, and yet suddenly and miraculously all my test results show "normal."


I've written too many times about how this headache feels to revisit the topic now. It's all-encompassing, It's growing, and it's the Big Bang from which my current universe began. Medication doesn't touch it, there is nothing to see on an MRI or CAT scan, and it was one of the first three symptoms I brought to the healthcare professionals back in January. Fatigue,  a  headache, a bulging eye. My recent love of Lewis Carroll quotes stems from my shared experience with Alice I'm sure, even the Alice that Grace Slick sang of. "Normal" and I inferred "There's nothing wrong with you, you're making this whole thing up." when I heard it, and having "disease" yanked from the sand of my consciousness allowed depression to well up from below and fill the void.

I was too ill to go to work yesterday; missed some real money I needed to earn. I believe that was the effects of the evil pill that warns "Taking this drug during pregnancy can result in the birth of a brainless baby." I had been professionally overdosed on this, and it shifted my world on its axis. I had Michael take it to his own doctor to dispose of it, I could 't bear to pollute the public water supply with a substance that may rob who-knows-how-many unborn of their brains. That's how we found out it was a "very big pill to treat a headache." and what dosage an actual epilepsy sufferer might be given to start treatment. I've decided without consultation that I won't be taking any more of that, it's poison to me. 

The depression was the result of an expectation that I've been holding on to, that a cause for these recent years of illness was simple to find, and simpler to cure. Graves' Disease is in the thyroid. Cut it out, get me on with my life. Years of symptoms, and months of treatment set me up for this, and I fell for it, the easy fix. The quick cure. Apparently that isn't to be the case, and my random thought generator created "This is nothing, this is everything, and I'm doomed to live and die this way for as long as it takes." In that dream that has me spinning long after the string is pulled, much like the gyroscope top I used to have as a toy, I have been rotating madly yet unable to move or create.  Waiting to topple from lack of energy, both wishing for and resenting my centrifugal force. Whatever ailment I have may not kill me, but prolonged lack of creativity surely will. 


I allowed a Jesus lady place her hand on my throat and pray for my healing the other day. I was at work and she was an account representative for the phone book. Strange and inappropriate in the professional world, to say the least. How we got around to my malaise and her christianity in one sales call isn't the story, it's that I let her touch me and say "In Jesus name"  which are two things that are not normal behavior for me. I did that for her, because it was good for her and on some level I envy, it did something for her. I am this desperate, and yet still able to give a stranger that out of kindness or whatever it is that drives me to still identify the needs of others and work to serve them from an empty larder of my own.


I'm starting to have a diminishing resentment and anger for the "Code word Jesus" people, maybe I'm just too tired, or I'm noticing that we believe many of the same things and each have our own vocabulary to describe it. I believe that focused intention can change the state of things, she likes to drop Jesus' name. I think we're both doing the same thing. The reason I know it was ritual and not healing is that I feel just a little bit worse every time I check in with myself, rather than a gradual improvement.

Have you ever heard a radio-controlled airplane flying overhead if the engine isn't functioning correctly, or it's running out of fuel? I'm writing with the same sputtering fits and starts as that sound, but I will pilot this blog until it lands or crashes anyway. I'm writing. Except for one small gift I made for Christi and some engineering and preparation I've done for one of Molly's sewing projects this is the first urge to create I've had in days. I'm going with it, it may be the smallest symbol of my return to who I am but I'm clinging to it nonetheless. I've felt so lost, so deep in the belly of a capricious old-testament God's whale that I will take what I can get. I couldn't paint to save my life at the moment, but I have some words priming the pump and that will have to stand as an acceptable start. I've missed me. 

The symbols my mind used in my dream are not important to anyone but fish in the school of Freud I suppose. The urgency of my waking and my need to chronicle them are more like who I've come to be though, and 4:30 or not I committed with coffee and sat in this chair to begin. I feel my normal fatigue, and the onset of the pain medication I swallowed with my first cup, and like Alice I'm sure that this little journey down the rabbit-hole will yield little more if any sense.  I've been in the black for three days though, and unless one is an accountant that is not a promising state to occupy. I thought for a moment or two, of simply giving up. The idea of living with this physical state robbed me of my will to continue, which was the litany I sobbed repeatedly to the doctor. "I can't go on like this, I can't go on like this." 


Michael's calm yet frantic state of concern when I reach boiling point makes me feel guilty; makes me wish that as I had for so many years I could clamp down and hold in the truth of my experience. I don't have that ability any more. I've become too real, and in the ongoing experiment that is my marriage I am truthful all the time, even when it's ugly. I wouldn't hurt or distress him ever, if given the choice. The previous statement belies that statement even as I type it. He is hurt and distressed that I am not well and declining, and that fact has no pretty face to wear. 

I may have ground this topic until all the gears are stripped now, and be ready to close. I don't have a waking awareness of why the dream-chanters chose "Is there anybody left?" to drone repeatedly, there certainly are  plenty of people who care about me and how I am doing. It's a symbolic statement of something, and maybe after the sun comes up I'll be able to decode it after all. I do still hear it though, a message from myself that woke me and my drive to string words for such a long time.