(Phaysis)

I think I sleepwalked (sleptwalked?) this morning.

Didn’t get much sleep last night and had to wake up kinda early to be at work by 9am. Got up when my alarm told me to, went to the living room, sat in front of my computer (like I always do), and then…promptly fell back asleep. I slept long enough to start dreaming.

I dreamed that I was sitting at my computer, in my last apartment, and talking to a friend from home. There was an annoying knock on my door. I interrupted the conversation, got up and looked through the peephole; didn’t recognize the guy on the other side. He announced who he was, I opened the door and saw him and all his jesus buddies decorating the entire apartment complex courtyard in christmas decorations, asked if I wanted to join in on the party. I made a jerking-off motion and slammed the door, went back to my computer, and finished my conversation. My ex-roomate walks in and I snap to and wake up.

Dream over. I went to shower and get dressed for work. As I get to the door to leave, I notice that both of the locks on the door are…unlocked. Woah.

Either I forgot to lock them as I carried my bike in from last night, or I sleepwalked this morning. But did somebody knock on my door? Did I answer? Did I do the jerking-off motion and slam the door? Did I answer the door in my underwear?

Unless I start getting strange looks from the landlady, I will never know.

I’m going to write about a dream. This morning, I had a fucked-up dream. I was in love; this girl and I were hanging out. Something small was in bloom. As dreams go, she dropped out of the plot as I went elsewhere.

I was in a big house, ostensibly a place I lived in. It was clean, the light was cold, the walls were white. Found a needle full of heroin. Someone told me to not inject it, but that’s exactly what I did. I walked off, found a vein in my left elbow, and shot up. Like it was nothing. Felt the cold warmth in my arm as it spread. Felt it take over. Felt it take control. I disposed of the needle and stumbled into my bedroom, fell into bed. Felt everything that’s ever been described to me: mental calm, inner peace, warmth, a sense of belonging, a feeling of love.

Maybe my life is so cold and lonesome that there’s an excess of the neurochemicals associated with belonging to something and being loved; that they manifest themselves in dreams. Sounds plausible. I also watched a movie last night with similar themes to the dream, so there’s that. Things like movies and shows always reassemble themselves into the plots of my dreams.

Everything is explained…except for the fact that I’d willingly shoot up heroin in a dream. Like it was natural. It’s a dream, so no consequences, I guess. Not something I’d like to do, ever, mostly out of the fear of sliding downhill, like I did with cigarettes. The first smoke came naturally, flourished in an environment of friendship and solidarity with other people, and slid down into a lonely 2-pack daily habit.

I never want to play with that kind of fire ever again. I want to feel loved, to feel like I belong, but not at that price. Never at that price.

Three days ago, I had a dream where I was hanging out, drinking or whatever. Surrounded by friends. And I managed to smoke up an entire pack of cigarettes. With much aplomb. I felt guilt, regret. Then I woke up, took a breath. Realized that it was only a dream.

After all of this time, the craving is still there; the hunger for the smell; the feel of breathing through a column of burning tobacco; the clench of the lungs; the rush. The addiction. It wanes, it gets forgotten, but every so often it rears its head and smiles. This carries a special poignancy with me today because, offically, this is my second anniversary as a non-smoker. February 18th, 2004 is when I quit for good. Borrowing a turn of phrase from reformed alcoholics, I am two years old. I could say it’s my second life, but this life is exactly the same as the life I had before I started smoking at age 23.

Do I regret quitting? Yes, of course. It was my crutch, my fixation. The heady buzz smoothed away my anxiety. But I’m damned happy that I quit. I can breathe now. I can dream now. I’m able to see and feel the benefits of quitting. It’s the final end to one of my most despicable acts of self-destruction. May that part of me be forever destroyed.

Rest In Peace, Shawn the Smoker. October 1995 – February 2004

The disturbing, unsettling dreams continue.

About a week ago, I dreamed that I went back to school. Not just any school — I went back to Ouachita Baptist University, the place where I spent/wasted 5 1/2 years of my life. Yeah, Ouachita. All I remember was that I was riding in the back seat of a car, there were something like 5 other people in the car, and we were on our way from Austin to Arkadelphia. Upon arrival, I make my way to my new room on the third floor of Daniel Hall South, where I had a room at one point. The room was on the front side of the dorm. I remember looking around and seeing how everything, though familiar, had thoroughly changed. Even the students had changed into Abercrombie and Fitch models with more clothing and more praise to the Almighty. Feh.

So, I’m there in my room, it’s overstuffed with people, and I’m sitting in the doorway next to the hall talking to who? My Mojo’s friends. Weird. So both male and female friends are there with me, we’re talking and trying to keep our voices down, and one of the girls laughs a little too loudly. This gets the attention of the Resident Assistant (both of them, actually — seems OBU had started putting 2 RA’s per floor instead of 1), and they kick her out of the men’s dorm (OBU is a Baptist university, so of course there’s no in-room visitation with the opposite sex). I walk out after her, make my way to the end of the dorm and the base of the footbridge, where there’s still tons of people, and I take off towards the woods behind the dorm, first at a full run, then after not being able to run (it’s a dream, after all), I settle at a rushed jog. I wake up before I reach the woods.

That dream, scary as it was, really is just my memory kicking in. Earlier that evening, I was talking to friends online and dragging up memories of when I was in school. Later on in the evening, I was at Mojo’s, and the place in the smoking section, where I sat, was packed and crowded. These experiences and memories sat and stewed all night until *pop* they form a dream. And that dream scared the shit out of me. So, not only did I go back to school, I did so at the loss of all that I’ve come to rely on for support. I left my job, I left my car behind, I left pretty-much everything behind to go back. I didn’t even have financial aid. I just went. That disturbs me the most. Freaky, creepy.

Fast forward to this morning. This weekend, since Friday night, I’ve been sick with another case of sinusitis (the second case in three weeks), so I’ve been sleeping a lot. This morning, the final dream that carried me back to the conscious world, was another “Going back to Ouachita” dream. This one was a little different, though.

I dreamed that I went back, and this time I took my roomate Patrick with me. I knew that, like me, he had to finish some schooling and get a degree. So we went, and we were roomates there as well. This time, things were different, though. I drove the both of us there, from Austin to Arkadelphia, in my car. All our stuff was in my car (don’t ask me how). Our room, as you may guess, was also on the third floor of Daniel Hall South, front side. At first I was thinking it was an old friend’s old room, but it was actually two doors down towards the middle of the hall. And instead of getting there at dusk, like my previous dream, we got there mid-morning, so the sun was beaming through the blinds (now that I think of it, that makes no sense at all, because the front side of the dorm faces the west). Whatever.

So, the dorm is different, again. Carpeting in the hallway. Brown carpeting. The room has been renovated: the closets are gone. In their place is a set of wood-framed bunkbeds. There were no closets anymore. The whole room was carpeted as well; when I was at OBU, only a small few of the rooms in Daniel Hall had any shred of built-in carpeting, and those rooms were half-carpeted, at that. I found the new campus ethernet ports in the corner; I remembered looking for them (they didn’t exist until after I had left that school). Everything was spacious, open, and empty; 80% of the rooms were still sitting with doors open, waiting on the students to come back. There were no RA’s. Just me and Pat, and our first load of stuff.

We paid a visit to the student center, I showed him the post office, the bookstore, the grand stairwell, some of the classrooms. I remembered talking to some of the students who had made it back early. We were there, we were older than everyone, we were smokers, and we were there at Ouachita Baptist University. The sun was shining bright and warm, things looked hopeful (kinda), but we were still there, without degree plans, without financial aid, without jobs, with nothing but our stuff.

Ok, interpretation time: the shining sun in the window is from the fact that currently my bed is beneath the window of my bedroom. The window faces south, so the sun comes in every day, almost all day. It was shining bright and warm on me as I slept in today. But why Ouachita again? I don’t quite know yet, but I think it may have been related to finding a text file on my computer outlining my student loan debts and how much I owe to whom. That may have kick-started the neural memory mass again, or something of the sort. I’ve also kinda, and I haven’t thought this through completely yet, I’ve lately been thinking about driving back to Arkadelphia, for real, to go back to the place where I had my first cigarette and ceremoniously undo everything by having my last at that spot. But why was Patrick there with me? Why was I dragging his ass back to OBU? I really don’t know. If anybody would be bad fit for OBU, he would, hands-down. I really don’t know.

So, this thread totally scares me. I don’t want to go back. I can’t go back. I know I won’t go back. The thought of being surrounded by Arkansas’ finest spoiled uberyouth with high-minded religious intentions to bang each other’s brains out in motels creeps me out. The thought of having to sit through another Chapel session frightens me. The thought that I will know absolutely no one there save the few professors who still have tenure makes me freak.

Please, make it stop. Gah.

The messed-up dreams continue.

This morning I was shocked awake again, this time just 10 minutes before my alarms were set to go off. Dreamed I was involved in a breakup, maybe mine, maybe someone else’s. In an effort to seek comfort, I grabbed a carload of friends and we went riding around. Found ourselves at some place where there were huge screens playing video games and ads for video games, kinda like a messed-up version of Dave and Buster’s. Something seemed really odd about this place, and this girl who was riding with me also sensed it, so we went wandering from room to room. Found this one room that had curtains all around it on the walls, much like a movie theater.

Someone we knew, someone whom we met recently in one of the previous rooms, told us to look deeper inside this room, and so we did. Lifted the curtain in one spot and found a door. We went through. What was on the other side was a secret society, a secret lab, a hideout, all kinds of people there doing business, holding training, philosophizing about politics and stuff. I had a camcorder with me and started taping. As we walked room to room we ended up in this whole area that looked well-kept, was brightly lit, and looked very much like a television studio.

As we stepped out of the studio, where a show was being produced, a plainclothes cop or secret agent got the girl I was with and got me too. Found the handycam and the tape inside; asked me to please eject the tape and hand it to her, very much in the fashion that someone in airport security would ask me to do so, basically to see if my camera was real and not a weapon. She took us down to the station, walking past many of the rooms we wandered through. The station wasn’t too far, only a few rooms over. All my friends I’d gone riding with were there, and I was given the main seat at the table, where the handycam and its tape were sitting.

An officer came in and started asking me questions, questions concerning me, my affairs. I started getting curious about why they were holding us, and they gave no suitable answers, so we were stuck there while their questions to me grew more and more personal. I was answering them as truthfully as possible when they started asking me about my mother. This seemed to be going too far as they were asking me about when I had last seen her, spoke to her, called her, what she was doing with her life, etc., etc. Then they revealed to me why I had been held for questioning — they had evidence my mother was involved in a secret, hidden society, and I was involved in the case; the tape in the handycam had evidence.

All I saw was me leaving the room while mumbling something about ladies and gentlemen, cabin, and pressure.

I blindly tore off in my car, filled up the tank, pulled into the driveway of an upstairs apartment I was renting above a nice house somewhere in the Hyde Park neighborhood, and proceeded to unload my car for packing things in for a long trip. I knew I had to see my mother.

And that’s when I woke up.

I strongly believe that dreams are essentially little more than random neural patterns, experienced as memories, sounds, images, events, etc. The brain does its best to understand and make sense of the neural noise. In my case, and especially in the case of my dream this morning, every single thing my brain filled-in that was triggered by the noise was from recent memory. That seems to be the minefield that my own brain pulls from; others are from distant memories, some are completely imaginative. Why my brain pulled those memories, I cannot know or predict; I do know I was feeling stressed, anxious, tense, sad. Brains are good about controlling your emotions without your oversight. I have a feeling that because of the emotions I was sensing, a strong coloration was put on the memories recalled to fill the static gaps, and drew up tense memories amongst the completely random.

Ok. I do remember talking to a friend, online, about a local electronics retail store. Mentioned the rooms full of stuff, gadgets. Recalled the big screens, the game systems, the advertising everywhere. Wondered about being able to buy a handycam there and before I paid for it filled up a tape with video from inside the store, just so I could show my online friend what the inside of this one particular store looked like. Ok, those memories have been discovered.

Ok, what about the driving around? Ah, yes, my roomate and I spent over an hour just driving around out in the countryside last night, visiting some neighboring counties. Not exactly a carfull of people, but it’s enough for a dream. The filling of the gas tank? I did that last night on the drive.

But what about the room with the curtains, and the TV studio? Ok, yesterday while looking online for news about the New England area power blackout, where I read articles about TV studios going off the air and suffering with backup power, I came across a sponsored link at the bottom of an article that was selling “blackout curtains.” Wha? So I clicked and was sent to a business that sold really thick curtains that you put behind your normal curtains to completely black out and darken a room. Great for those with night jobs. Well, interesting; I thought they were selling them for the old WW2 usage. Context-based ad serving engines kinda flubbed on that one. Feh.

And so all my images are discovered and answered. But what about my mother? I know it’s been a few weeks since I called and chatted with her; I’ve been considering doing so for the past few days. And there that is. Somehow I think I’ll be calling her soon.

My dreams reveal nothing; they only mix and match recent memories. :sighs: Anyone out there feel the same about themselves?