Dreams

A couple weeks ago I developed symptoms of graft-vs-host disease (GVHD).  This is when my donor cells recognize my body as something foreign, and attack it.  Generally, GVHD is desired, because it indicates that my donor cells are likely to also be attacking whatever traces of cancer still remain in my body.  Right now my skin and liver are being affected, and I've begun taking some diesel steroids to keep the GVHD under control.  The whole thing is sort of a balancing act, with the ultimate goal being to minimize graft-vs-host and maximize graft-vs-disease.  Because I'm on a lot of steroids, I'm loaded up with Atavan to counter any possible anxiety (roid-rage).  I feel heavy and weird, but calm and comfortable at least.  Enough of that.  I'm here today to talk about dreams.

It's too bad all these things can only happen in my dreams.  Only in dreams, in beautiful dreams

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Since I started taking an anti-depressant called Remeron, I've been having vivid dreams almost every night.  When I told my friend Matt about it, he said how he had taken it to try to quit smoking (he still smokes) and it gave him all sorts of fucked up dreams. Well, I love to dream, but these have been something else.  A lot of the time I dream three or more separate dreams, one after another, so the entire dream experience consists of different settings, characters and feelings.  They are fairly lucid dreams; I cannot necessarily control what happens, but I am often aware I am dreaming and things that are happening in my real life are alluded to in these dreams  Let me describe a couple.

In one dream, I had to return to some motel that was in the middle of some tropical swamp in order to pick up my luggage I had left in there in a locker.  Unfortunately, luggage left after a day is destroyed, but you still had to pick it up.  I got my tattered pair of jeans and left (in the dream I remember thinking that it was a good thing I had a new pair of jeans coming in the mail the next day).  Some time later in the dream, I must have come home from travelling, and I had these giant pimples all over my left knee.  I began to squeeze them and squeeze some kind of yellow larvae out of each one.  (Botfly larvae infect unlucky tropical travelers all the time, you can look it up on youtube).  After I woke up I made the connection from dream pimples to my actual skin inflammation from my GVHD.

In another dream, I had just invested in a Panera (the suburban Au bon Pain, if you ask me) and it was the grand opening.  There were a lot of people from high school there, popular kids, people I knew but was never close to.  I was wearing my mask and gloves and everyone walked by me and congratulated me on the opening.  Next thing I know, I'm at "my" Panera, sans masks and gloves, and this Panera is actually a sit-down restaurant with a wait staff.  One of my employees points to a gentleman seated with his wife and adult son, and tells me that's the owner of the company and I better make a good impression.  Which turns into me trying to take their drink orders.  His son orders a "Rainbow Smash," and he and his wife order some confusing gin drink.  The owner asks me if the juice is fresh in a very vague way, and I have to struggle with not knowing anything about being a waiter.  The whole dream I'm thinking, "Why did I decide to be his waiter?"

Black dream come kiss me loose

Another recent dream involved riding in the back of an SUV that was hightailing it all over some dreamlike urban highway.  Eventually the driver clips a Fire Department SUV so of course we go faster and faster, trying to avoid all of the fire engines that have begun to chase us.  I can feel myself being thrown from side to side as the driver twists and turns.  This was a shorter dream that ended suddenly in the middle of the chaos.

A third dream I've had involved me sitting on the toilet in what looked to be an old wooden building. Wooden floors, walls, and ceilings, with an ornate glass door.  All of a sudden an older woman opens the door and I say, "Sorry, I'm in here."  She doesn't seem to get it and I keep telling her to shut the door.  Then a few more older women appear behind her and they are all looking at me.  I try in vain to tell them I will be a minute and to close the door.  They don't respond to me, and now there is an old man that appears behind them.  He is taller and pokes his head in, then enters the bathroom, leaving the ladies standing in the doorway.  At this point I am very frustrated and I ask him what on earth he wants.  He is dressed in a long black robe that says JESUS on it in red.  I think the dream ended with me putting that robe on.


That's what I can remember for now.  Usually my dreams involve winning a lot of money on a scratch ticket or something.  In high school I had a dream where I picked up my cat Onion and as I cradled him like a baby, he screamed out "MISERY!" in a human voice.  When I was a very little kid still living in North Carolina, I had a recurring dream where I'd be in the Fresh Market (a supermarket that just had a bunch of rustic crap everywhere [a giant wagon wheel, for one] to make the food seem healthier) and would walk up a staircase and end up in a parking garage that was way high in the clouds, and I'd see my dad's car parked with one wheel over the edge.

Noble Onion RIP

Good or bad, dreams do end.  Then what?

Force myself awake from this nightmare, only to realize it was reality