One Pille, Two Pill, Orange Pill, Blue Pill

I messed up my pills this morning. Really weird. I have dreams where I just keep putting pills in my mouth without realizing it until I notice my mouthful of pills and spit everything out and worry about what I've already swallowed and what I still need to swallow. This morning, reality felt closer to that than it ever has before.
I went to take my pills as always. I start on the big capsules and then take the little ones, so I grabbed my norotriptyline and downed my most recent dose: two. I went for the next vial and realized I'd  just taken my norotriptyline. That's a night-time only drug. Fuck. Not worth making myself puke (I've never done this in a finger-down-the-throat way, only by mentally allowing my body to let go when it was already nauseous, and I wasn't nauseous, and I didn't want to change that). Fine. It's not going to kill me, I'm just taking it 12 hours early. Now where's the Prozac I was reaching for in the first place?
And having just taken two norotriptyline, I took two Prozac. Not on purpose. I wasn't consciously aware of my mistake for a solid minute, then, boom. I'd taken two because I was compensating for the two wrong pills with two right pills. Prozac fucks me up. I wondered if I was asleep, dreaming this. When my teeth fall out I know I'm asleep. Elementary school reunion is a dream, too. No, this time I was awake, but not for long. I was extremely careful with the rest of my drugs and then took a whole as-needed lorazepam to hold back the double-Prozac jumpy crazy weird shit and anything else unpleasant.
I fell asleep for real and for hours. So much for Thursday. I hear Fridays are nice.

Unconscious Connection

Yesterday, in real life, I couldn't find the cable to connect my camera to my computer to upload photos.

This morning, in dream, I found the cable in my desk drawer where I'd already looked. Realizing I was asleep, I grabbed onto the cable as tight as I could and tried to pull it with me into wakefulness. I did, for once, manage to wake myself up, but of course I didn't have the cable.

Back in real life, I went to check the drawer. The cable was visibly sitting on the shelf under the drawer.

Un-Cycling

Icky Lady Time again. I can't say "that time of the month" anymore because it's no longer such a standardized monthly thing, thank you progesterone-only pill that's supposed to make things better not worse. I spent insane amounts of yesterday and today in coma-mode. Dreams about being on a cruise with my family that turned into a submarine, dreams about doing things and saying things that I then wished I hadn't done or said and couldn't undo or take back, dreams about all my everyday life events so when I wake up I have to double-check my memory bank to make sure I did something and didn't just dream it. Possible Boy and Aural Girl came over to eat leftovers from Sunday night's Indian Food Extravaganza (there's a draft of a post about that night but I never managed to properly verbalize everything so in Blogland it never existed...there's just so much that never makes it into writing...too many infinite factors making up life and I want to express them all and I can't). Aural Girl has a cold. I need to go to the grocery store and thought I'd make her some mazzoh ball soup today. I went to the grocery store in at least one of my dreams. I think I did my Christmas shopping, too. Then I wake up and it's hours and hours later and I never left my bed, never changed my clothes or brushed my teeth.

To be honest, I don't entirely hate it. I hate it when there was something I had to do and missed. Today, I had enough food in the house to put off going to the grocery store. I almost finished rewiring another chandelier. I read the rest of A Wrinkle In Time. And I danced between the realities un, sub, and mostly consciousness. No fighting it, just drift and play with the wonder of wakefulness.

Dreams, Screams, As It Seems

I'm sore today. Wine, weather, and attacking the treadmill to exercise my panic attack demon all caught up with me. Lots of sleep. I only did a tiny bit of work, and nothing with visible money results or getting out of the house.
In my nap dream, my whole body hurt so badly I could barely move and I was trying to take a bath to loosen up my muscles but I couldn't move to turn the water off and I knew I was sleeping but I couldn't wake myself up and I was worried about what was real and what was dream because the hot water felt unquestionably hot and the cold knob on the faucet felt hard and solid and cold and my aches felt present and the water wet and with all my tactile functions and reactions intact, what did that say about my dreaming? And more importantly, what did that say about everything I do and feel when I'm "awake?" All these questions bothered me mid-dream as the hot water kept rising and I wanted out of the bathtub but couldn't get there on my own. I tried to yell "Mom!" but I couldn't break through the layers of dream. I wanted to shout something, anything, to wake myself or alert people in the conscious world so that maybe they could help me escape.

I dream this way a lot.

Possible Boy sent me a text message from the bar with a photo of the pumpkin I carved lit up sitting alongside the cash register and booze. I carved a row of various beer and booze glasses, so it makes sense back there. Possible Boy also texted me nice things. When I said I hoped our raucous adventure last night didn't dampen his day today, he said (and I quote), "Nope not at all, in fact I was smiling all day because of it."

Tomorrow is Halloween. I think Little Red Riding Hood may make her first full appearance since freshman year at Nameless Liberal Arts College's Safer Sex Night. Possible Boy and Other Girl are coming over to raid my costume box (yes I have a costume box) so that they, too, can participate in the dress-up madness. I. Love. Halloween. Alter-egos on parade. Be something you're not, or that you want to be, or that you are but you don't usually show or try not to show. My dog has a pig costume, but otherwise he'd make an excellent Big Bad Wolf. Well, Little Bad Wolf. Maybe I can steal Neighbor Guy's dog. That's a big friggin' dog.

The universe is huge.

Tonight I was going to finish some of my projects. I didn't finish one. Now it's 1:30 AM and if I don't go to sleep I'll be a zombie tomorrow even without a costume.

What ever happened to individual rocket packs and rocket boots and all that? They figured in so prominently in the 60s and 70s projections of the 21st century, but I certainly don't have one. I would love to move around in three dimensions instead of two. That's a whole other thing I've been writing in my head and will probably stick in here before too long: seeing and moving and living on limited dimensions and planes of existence.

Get ass in bed. Read until pass out. Be awesome tomorrow.

Dream: NOT for the Squeamish

Migraine day. Lots of sleeping and lunch at Neighbor Guy's house.

In one of my migraine dreams, I was with my family somewhere vaguely exotic and tropical. A less chartered part of the Caribbean, perhaps? The four other members of my immediate family were discussing plans to go on an evening canoe trip or something while I tried to rest on the large thatch-like bed/couch thing. There were other people milling about the cabin and I wasn't feeling well and I tried to ignore everything and everybody so I'd be ok in time to go on the non-optional evening outing. I noticed what looked more like a zit than a wart on the bottom of my foot and started picking at it. Immediately it oozed out a semi-solid snake of pinkish puss that went from expected and thin to pencil-thick in barely a moment of squeezing. Now I was freaked out mortified and just wanted this out of my body, so as I called for my dad the doctor I kept squeezing until it burst into a huge snot-colored anemone of moldy spaghetti squash. I screamed and jumped away from it, or as far away as I could from my own foot. I was completely disgusted and terrified, but according to my dad and the other people who knew about that sort of thing, it was really no big deal. There was a certain small parasite that, until recently, scientists though was extinct, but it had shown up a few other times recently in similar regions. The more I squeezed, the more I'd fed it, but it's otherwise not harmful and you just have to wait for it to die and/or scrape it off. As we scraped my foot, I thought to myself that we should have taken a picture first; how often does the scientific community get to see such an advanced example? I imagine most people, like me, just want it off and gone as fast as possible so very little research gets done with the parasite in action.
My foot was still quite gross and the parasite was still days away from dying, but my parents expected me to still come on the canoeing trip. I just wanted to throw up and die and lock my foot in another room, but I knew I'd have to suck it up and sit in a boat and get seasick on top of everything else.

I woke up with the moldy spaghetti squash image still ripe in my mind.

Dream

I've been having dreams about anime. I'm alternately watching and taking part in a series in which consciousness is entirely cyberized so that you can enter/hack into the consciousness of anything from other people to fish. The main character is a variation on the General from Ghost in the Shell and there's some sort of shady something going on that she's investigating (I slip back and forth from watching and being her) and these rings of bad people are clearly about to do something and the question is what, and you don't know who's good or bad or themseleves or anything, and there's a general societal feeling that anybody not completely good is bad so that there is very little trust and checkpoints everywhere for everything and lawyers are some of the only people who know the real rights anybody has when being checked and for life in general, so they're this whole class of people that have a strange power of understanding the system which can then be used to help or to hurt people, so both good and bad people have really intense opinions about lawyers since they both completely distrust but also desperately need them. The main character person has no idea why the 2 or more lawyers that are trying to get in with the bad people ring and what their motivations might be, good or bad or inbetween. And the inbetween is a really difficult area to deal with, because the masses tend not to believe in it but the main character at least (particularly when I'm her) sees that the only good aren't the perfectly good and that people are mostly just people and that needs to be accepted.

In dreams

In my dream, right before I woke up:

“Little girl! Do you know where you are trying to plant your seed? In that soil is all the sadness of the world!”
“Yes, I know, and I think that’s the best place for a tree to grow.”

in dreams

More sleep, more dreams, including:

• tracking down my redneck fugitive biological father, then being torn between working with the authorities to pass along his address and information or just leave him alone, which is all he wanted
• being part of a military tactical team that trapped a pedophile in action in a New York City park, but then something went wrong and someone set off an atomic bomb that split up and bounced a several times, creating four or five mushroom clouds around Manhattan and contaminating everything from the air to the water to the soil to the pizza. Places that claimed to decontaminate pregnant women and sell clean pizza were big deals.

the coldness that is my life/tea

Last night I had a strange dream (so what's new?). My name was Coleen and I was at a hospital getting all these tests done and I tried to joke, "It's not like I have cancer," and the nurse wouldn't say anything. And I kept saying "At least I don't have cancer!" but no one would respond. Somehow, I figured out they thought I might have blood cancer, but they didn't want to tell me.

The passage of time is a strange thing when you're dead. Sunday is only different because there is no mail and I can't make phone calls to business establishments. Some days, all I have to show for myself are three more punched out pills from my Effexor packs.

I shouldn't be such a fucking fatalist. Yesterday I was in a GREAT mood. I was on two Vicodin and my dad came out and took me to get my new double-dose of Topamax at Costco and we picked up his iPod car adapter thing I pre-purchased online from Best Buy and I gave him his back his now LibriVox-filled iPod (both Jewnukah presents) and we listened in the car on the way to and from truly fabulous Indian food at Tiffin. I'm in Daddy's Girl mode these days, and it helps that he seems to know how to handle me in Migraine Mode, so we had a lovely evening while my mom was off visiting my sister and grandmother and aunt and other such relatives in California. It was blizzarding and cold and lovely. But because at this particular moment I am not on Vicodin and I am cold and in pain and fussy, you get the Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow version of my life. Lucky you!

Also, I am PMSed. That helps. A lot. Nine times.

Oh, crap. I put Chai in the microwave and forgot about it. Now it may be strong and cold. My life is ruined. Living with constant pain is one thing, cold tea is quite another.

I like writing. It makes me happy. It is cathartic. Particularly writing about myself. Narcissism is cathartic, too. Me me me mine mine mine write write write.

And this is without the Vicodin.

Now where's that effing tea.

crafts and crap and life and strife and monkey and chunky

Saturday, I was a real person again! On my way out the door I ran into my cousin-in-law, who was rehearsing for a play in the lobby of my building. I then ran errands and met with a friend at the Handmade Market, a craft fair at a bar, coincidentally located around the corner from where my cousins live. It was pretty entertaining and I managed to buy only a $2.50 home-made lipgloss that is really quite lovely, though I was smitten with a series of bracelets made from old watch faces and subway tokens, but I don't wear bracelets and didn't know for whom to buy one. As we were heading towards the door to look for food, I was thinking I should call my cousins and ask where Bite, a restaurant I'd been to a few times with them that I liked very much, was located. Then I noticed that one of the exits for the bar actually led into Bite. So we ate at Bite and the food took forever and I was very hungry but it was good and the conversation was good and I was out and social and human, even if we were surrounded by hipsters. On my way home I stopped at Joann Crafts and spent too much money, came home and immediately made a completely lovely set of cards and one of my weirdest cards ever. I listed them on Etsy before going to bed, and the really weird one sold Sunday morning! I win.

Sunday morning, NBF and I drove my old car to my family-friends' house and signed papers and picked up my new car! I have a new car! 2003 Saab 9-5! It is GORGEOUS! It is all silver and sleek and pretty and leather and has seat warmers and I have to be nice to it and not mess it up because it is too nice to mess up. I even put a towel down on the front seat because my dog was getting snowy salty paw prints on it when we drove to my parents' house and I didn't want it to have snowy salty paw prints. It's too pretty to have snowy salty paw prints. Pretty pretty princess car.

Last night I went to my parents' for dinner. Brisket and latkes and menorah lighting. Jewish much? I'd mentioned that I had to leave first thing this morning because I had a lot to do today, with going to the DMV and errands and phone calls and whatnot now that I'm functional again and it would be a weekday. My mom was asking about all the specifics of my phone calls and such, as though it were interesting conversation. I hate talking about that crap. It's lame and annoying enough to have to do it without it becoming the topic of polite conversation. Plus as soon as my mom knows I have to do something, she takes it as something she has to remind me to do. So I kept being vague despite her odd prodding and changed the subject.

I frequently dream about being walked in on when I'm changing or going to the bathroom, or that strange uninvited people keep getting into my house or apartment even after I thought I locked all the doors. My subconscious isn't always subtle.

I drove home from my parents' this morning feeling that thick heavy pre-migraine tired, but I didn't sleep well last night, so I figured I'd pop pills and crash for an hour before getting started on my errands. Woke up with my alarm and MIGRAINE. Again. Fuck. More pills, more sleep. Still migraine. Basically slept all day and it's still here. I have another doctor's appointment in the morning, this time with a new internist, and since it's right next door to NBF's school I was driving him down there anyway, so maybe he'll get to do the driving and we'll see what New Doc can do for me if the headache doesn't die overnight. Fuckfuckfuck.

At least I'm getting several real days of real functioning between my migraine days now. Even if this is the new pattern, it's a better pattern. Let's go, optimism!

My dog, too, is a victim of my migraines. He doesn’t understand, crawls into bed with me and curls into the small of my back. As I stir he perches on my pillow, puts a possessive paw on my shoulder, rests his chin on my forehead. He whines with me, not at me, doesn’t try to play, only insists on going out when he really needs to.
I wake up and it’s dark, it’s light, it’s somewhere in between and I don’t know if the sun is on its way in or out. It’s Wednesday, it’s Friday, it’s Tuesday. I’ve tried to keep track, but the days get tangled in my dreams. I’m back at College #1, in high school, or facing my elementary school tormentors. I have to go to gym to graduate, take a history test I didn’t study for, learn advanced calculus in time for the final. The migraine weaves its way into my subconscious’s story lines, and it becomes the cause or effect in each of my stress dreams. I’m driving down a highway and my auras get so bad I hallucinate or pass out and crash. I dream that I can’t wake up and I know it’s true. Even the pain itself sneaks into my dreams and my dream-self has to lay down to cope.
But the sleep is better than the awake. When the migraine won’t listen to drugs, sleep is the only thing that can kill it at last. And awake is boring. I can only read for 20, maybe 30 minutes at a time, and even then my comprehension is fuzzy. The computer gets an even shorter stretch because it is too bright. TV is out of the question. My mom calls me and her voice and worry pierce through me; she means so well, but it’s all about her and I have to fight for my independence enough on my functional days that I just can’t handle her from under the covers. I call friends but they are out living their lives and I feel so alone in the dark I cry but that makes it hurt more and my dog whines along with me as we curl up and go back to sleep and pray maybe next time I’ll wake up ok again.

armageddon on my mind

Really bad dreams. Lots of Armageddon stuff. It was somewhat in the future and terrorists were everywhere and blowing up buildings and trains constantly and they were your friends and family so you couldn't trust anyone. Lots of sneaking out of buildings and getting away from areas and false bombs and real bombs and radiation and trying not to touch bodies of water because terrorists had spilled nuclear waste into them and it was so toxic they called it "razor water." Very upsetting.

Very bad dreams. Terrorists blowing up cities. Not cool. Trying to think of something else before going back to bed for more peaceful sleep.