122317b

A dream

A real one, not a poem*

Last night I dreamed that my wife brought me a snack in bed. I dreamed that I ate part of it, but it was going be hard to eat the sandwich while lying flat. So I woke her up and asked her if she would raise up the head end of the bed (there was no controller within my reach). She pointed out that I wasn't in a hospital bed , and asked if I wanted extra pillows. Then I stayed awake for a good while worrying about whether I would knock the sandwich on the floor if I didn't eat it (it was on my chest) and whether I could try to eat it while lying completely flat, and whether if I just left it there till morning it would spoil. Later I fell asleep and it wasn't until I woke up again, at the usual time, that I realized there was no sandwich. There never had been.

These dreams, from which I awaken thinking they were real, started a few years ago. When I was in the hospital for 2 months, and came home taking some additional medications. Is that the cause? Hallucinations, disorientation, and confusion seem like unsurprising side effects of drug interactions (I take about 10 different prescription drugs). Something else is different about these dreams. In them, I am disabled (as irl), and they take place in something like the real world. Most of my dreams occur in settings that seem ordinary at first, but aren't. And in most of them, I'm my old self. These dreams are more amusing than disturbing, so far, but I guess that could change.

I can only remember having a dream that I confused with reality one time (before the last few years). It happened decades ago. I dreamed that single-edge razor blades with edges that were only one molecule thick had been invented. I woke up thinking that was a really cool thing, and it took at least five or 10 minutes to realize that it was just a dream loosely based on a story by Larry Niven.


*This probably makes a lot more sense if you know I am a quadriplegic.