Glad It Was Just My Shoulder

Just woke up, and I’m having an interesting after-effect to my dream. I’m pretty sure it was because yesterday evening I was watching an episode of Doctor Who with Genesee, and it was the one where Martha was walking the earth, avoiding capture, after it had been taken over by some alien race… so in the show there was lots of ducking and running and hiding and all that.

My dream was similar, except it all took place in some sort of abandoned village, where there was a gang of people who were “in charge” of it (even though it wasn’t theirs) and me and a few others were running from building to building, house to house, and I eventually found one place where I was able to go in and lock the door, giving me a moment to rest and catch my breath before moving on.

One of the women in the gang found the shack where I was hiding though, and although she couldn’t get in – she stood outside with a big knife, taunting me that I wouldn’t be able to get out and that her friends were coming. But then she picked up a brick and threw it through the window in the door, smashing the glass, and allowing her to reach inside and unlock it. Before she could make her way in, I picked up that same brick, threw it, and hit her in the head.

It took her a second to get back up, but she grabbed the brick again and threw it at me, hitting me in the right shoulder. And since she was now inside the shack and still had that knife, me and a couple other people ran to the back door and escaped into the woods. I woke up at that point, but for the first five minutes of being awake I couldn’t lift my right arm. 😳 And it’s about 20 minutes later now, and my right shoulder still friggin’ hurts. I’ve got some “Nightmare on Elm Street” shit goin’ on… heh 😏

Get A Hobby

Bad dreams ended up waking me last night around 3am, and I’ve been up ever since. Kinda doesn’t matter what sleep schedule I keep these days, given that I’m not going anywhere and I didn’t even realize what day it was today. Not meaning April Fools Day, just meaning that I didn’t realize it was Wednesday. 😐🤷🏻‍♂️😏 Point being, anxiety filled sleep, waking up early… it didn’t lead to much of a day for me. I did text with Dad and Genesee a bit, and she got me thinking about playing the keyboard again. 🤔🎹🤷🏻‍♂️

I forget what she said, but it reminded me that thanks to the YouTube Music app searching my own videos for music to add… I ran across this old video of me playing Don’t Wake Me by Skillet. 😎 And when I did, I realized that if you put that keyboard in front of me now I’d have no idea how to play it. Elton John made a comment on his Melbourne Symphony album, that he was playing some songs that were so old that he had to re-learn them as well for that concert. 🙂 So that’s one thing I’m gonna try to make time for… “keyboard dickin’ around time” every now and then.

And then thanks to NASCAR and iRacing running these virtual races on the weekend… and apparently a dirt track / winged-car race tonight… that’s got my mind back on video games. 🤓🎮📺 I’ve got an XBOX One and a Playstation 4, yet it’s probably been at least six months since I’ve even turned either of them on. 😕 Once I got into a funk a while back, my brain just never seemed interested in reminding me that I’ve got kewl shit that I could play. So I’m gonna go through my games tonight and figure out which system I’ve got the best racing games for, and I’ll probably try to re-familiarize myself with all that. 🤔 I used to be good. Years ago I was really layin’ ’em down at the road courses, or at least it felt that way. (Wow, that was from 2013…)

I don’t wanna get ahead of myself, since I’ve already got a couple options there, but I’m probably gonna play around with time-lapse and long-exposure phone photography like I usually do each spring… plus I’ve got a couple new photogrammetry apps for creating 3D models from a series of regular digital photos, so that might keep my attention as well. Meh… we’ll see, I guess.

Don’t mind me… just doing a little more “talking out loud” to hopefully burn these ideas into my brain a little more effectively. 🤯 It’s not like I’m making valuable use of my time otherwise, so I might as well be doing something that I used to consider fun, eh? 😏 All this time stuck in the house might help me figure out where “old me” went. 🙂🤞🏻

Another Person’s Dream. Yay.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve got a decades-old blog, somewhere, where I used to regularly keep track of my weird ass dreams. But sometimes they’re interesting enough to merit a spot in the regular blog. Last night’s dream was a single, long, awful, hyper-realistic “action” nightmare. 😳 (And when it comes to what I may have seen, heard, or done during the prior day to cause any of it… who knows.) The cast, for whatever reason, was mostly people that I went to high school with. 🤔 Not necessarily even the “closer” of my friends.

It started off with Chris Woolard and Rich Nagel showing me their raptor pen, where yes… they had a real baby raptor, probably the size of a human toddler. They said I could go in and play with it, but that they didn’t advise it. 😧 I did anyway, though. It immediately knocked me down to my hands and knees and then proceeded to bite and attack my right shoulder. (Why my right? My left one is the one that’s damaged. Maybe fear of losing use of my remaining good arm?)

It chomped into me several times, finally just locking its teeth deep into my shoulder. 😖😫 I fell even closer to the ground, blood pouring into a puddle on the floor around me. I stayed as still as I could, which caused it to finally stop biting into me – and I was then face down on the floor, unintentionally blowing bubbles in my own blood as I tried to keep my breathing shallow enough that it would leave me alone. 😯

Brian White then pulled me up from the floor and helped me out of the pen, and had someone bandage up my shoulder. 🤕 As soon as that was done, I started looking for my phone so that I could leave… but it wasn’t in my pocket, wasn’t on my desk, wasn’t anywhere that it should have been. 😳 So I began to frantically look for it, with the panic of knowing that whoever had it would have access to my entire life…

As I walked up and down this dark auditorium, looking all around the chairs, desks, and people – eventually Matt McKinster motioned me towards a huge “home improvement store” area just outside the room we were currently in. 🤔 As soon as I got out there, I saw Jamie Faught carrying light posts for a customer… but he was about 20 feet tall, and they were like street light light posts. 😧 He nodded and smiled at me, but as I drew his attention away from what he was doing – the posts he was carrying smashed into dozens of giant ceiling fans that were above us all.

(If you’re still here and reading… well done. Other people’s dreams are so not-interesting… heh)

Everyone in the store, who were all regular sized like me… we all started running and screaming, because Jamie was falling, the posts were falling, and the smashed ceiling fans were falling – all in our direction. 😯😫 Some of the fans were still spinning like airplane propellers, which resulted in several violent “glass tornados” from which we all had to escape. ☹️ Luckily I spotted a big metal glove on the floor near me… 🤨

I put the glove on and shielded some people behind me as the glass shards began hitting us. The glove was able to deflect most of the debris, but we were still getting sliced and gashed by the stray pieces of glass as they flew by. 😖😭🤕 I was able to save five or six people before a different glass tornado attacked us from above, rather than straight on like the others had done. 👆🏻😳 It rained down on us so hard that it broke through the floor underneath us, sending us all falling into a darkened pit below.

At that point the wind stopped, the glass stopped flying around, the screaming people stopped screaming… and those of us that survived falling into the pit realized that we needed to climb our way out, over piles of busted glass and even more busted people. 😟☹️ When I made it to the edge at the top, thankfully my friend Desiree was there to take my hand and successfully pull me to safety. 😃

She was crying and acting so sorry that she wasn’t there to protect me when it all started, but told me that even though she was late – that I can always rely on her to be there for me eventually, when it really counts. 😊 There was other little stuff after that, which I can’t really remember, and then I woke up. And I was friggin’ tired, man. 😞 I mean, I know all of this shit just comes off as bizarre – but imagine experiencing it all as vividly as you’re experiencing things in the room around you right now as you read this blog entry. 🤷🏻‍♂️😏

Crazy shit. I’ll definitely take a pass on any dreams tonight if they’re gonna be anything like that again. 😓

Unwanted Realism

Had a good day yesterday, got a bunch of bills / paperwork / etc. done, and went to sleep in fairly decent shape. And then I had a series of some of the worst nightmares that I’ve had in quite a while. I can’t think of any reasons for them, nor can I link any of the dreams’ imagery to anything I saw or experienced during the day prior. 😯🥺🤷🏻‍♂️ So along with waking up several times during the night, when I finally woke up for good this morning I was legitimately exhausted. 😓 Way too real and stressful. Hours later and I’m still having a hard time shaking it off. (Chases, knife attacks, abducted kids, assaults, horror movie deaths… 😳 Oy…)

So now I feel like I’m having an awful day even though there’s nothing about this day (at least so far) that should make me feel that strongly one way or the other. 🤔😐 Heh… so along with just taking it easy today (since I’ve got my meeting tomorrow) I’ll have to kinda keep reminding myself that it’s not actually a bad day. 🙄😏 Nothing on the agenda, nothing that needs my immediate attention, so I’ll probably bubble up and just watch some YouTube and Netflix and try to avoid anything negative. 🤨📺

The only thing (based in reality) that’s got me a little bit anxious is that there’s some rainy / icy / snowy weather headed this way. 😳 But I’m sure by the time I’ll be leaving the house tomorrow, if anything has managed to accumulate it’ll be gone from the roads by time I’m out on ’em. 😌🤞🏻 And, ironically, it actually helps to focus my thoughts on the meeting with my WC attorneys tomorrow. It’s still stressful, yeah, but I know what I need to talk about, and however it goes it’ll still be pushing this shit further along towards a resolution or significant change… so yeah, still looking forward to it. 🙂

Vivid Nightmare Tale

Didn’t fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning last night, and I’m not sure if it was something that I saw the day before or something that I had subconsciously heard on the TV while I was sleeping, but I ended up having some awful (but amazing) vivid nightmares. 😯 At least they were situation based, rather than having anything to do with a specific friend or family member.

I’ve always had a knack for returning to the same fictional locations in my dreams, even over decades of time, as well as being able to “pick up where I left off” if I happen to wake up in the middle of a particularly interesting or intense dream. 🤷🏻‍♂️🧙🏻‍♂️ There are even a couple of fictional “characters” that have persisted over the years, albeit only on rare occasions. 😕🙂 It’s no “lucid dreaming” but I’ll definitely take it, compared to nothing but random, fleeting dreams which can never be returned to.

Last night’s dream, split by about ten minutes of waking up and settling back in, featured two different plane crashes. 😳 (And like I’ve acknowledged before, I know that hearing about other folks’ dreams isn’t always the most entertaining thing, but alas…) The first plane crash was one that I witnessed in the evening from our old house on Shepherd Hill. 😌 I actually had my phone set up in my bedroom window, to record a time-lapse video of the setting sun, but accidentally captured a small aircraft making some abrupt movements a couple of miles away – before crashing into the hills and trees. 😧 … 🛩️🌲🌳🌳🌲🌳🔥

There was distinct black smoke coming from the crash site, but the sun had set by this point, and a layer of fog had moved in, so rescue / recovery vehicles and aircraft seemed to be having a hard time locating the wreckage. 🤨🔭 I not only knew where it went down, but also had a recording of the event, so after a while of watching them struggle from a distance I decided that I needed to get into my car and go help out.

That’s when I woke up, but with the first part of that dream being so vivid (I’m leaving out many of the detailed details) I was hoping that I’d get back to sleep quickly and be able to pick up where I left off. 🥱🤞🏻

Back in the dream, I was already in my car (which was my 1979 Olds Delta 88) and driving up an increasingly narrow road on an increasingly steep mountain. 😬😣 But before I had even driven that far, I heard the sound of spooling jet engines above me – and I looked up to see a rescue oriented 747-200 about 2000 feet above, struggling to climb and avoid a similarly marked rescue blimp that was directly in its path. 😯✈️

The jet didn’t have the power to execute the climb and turn, so while it was able to avoid the blimp – it went into a stall and began to fall from the sky. 😬 I immediately stopped in my tracks, since it looked like the plane might graze the face of the mountain but wouldn’t necessarily hit me. Of course that didn’t end up being the case, and as the 747 fell parallel to the vertical face of the mountain, the belly of the plane banged into my car – knocking it off of the road and sending it falling thousands of feet towards a big lake below.

My car, along with many others from the road above, somehow fell relatively softly into the lake… while the plane crashed hard into the mountain on its way down, which meant there was a constant “rain” of debris endangering all of the surviving people in their cars. 😳☂️ Most of the cars ended up floating, and many people were getting out and trying to swim to shore, but they were inevitably hit by falling wings, engines, landing gear, etc. 😣🤕 The lake was also partially on fire due to the jet fuel, so saying that it was a chaotic scene would be a huge understatement.

But in the chaos, my car and several others floated together, so we used a bunch of bungee cables to connect them all and “fling” them with enough momentum to reach land. 🏝️ The dream fizzled out there, once we were all safe, but it was such a vivid dream that I can still remember the detail of everyone’s faces, the vertigo from the heights, the smell of burning kerosene and plastic plane seats, the shortness of breath while trying to not drown, the pinch of my hand under the tightening bungees, the way it went from unbearably noisy to silent except for the sound of the water… just all of it. 😃😌

Not what most people would consider a fun dream by any stretch of the imagination, but it was one that I was still glad to have had. Almost like the way that you can’t wait to see the weekend’s popular blockbuster action movie. 😎🤷🏻‍♂️😏 Because that’s what it felt like… like an extended scene from some awesome movie. Unfortunately, as it often happens (especially once things really go off the rails), it never really went back to the original “small plane crash” plot, nor did it provide any resolution to any of the rest… but hey, teamwork helped me and quite a few others survive quite the adventure. 🤓🤜🏻🤛🏻😄

(I know… I should save this shit for the dream blog. I mean that’s the whole point of it being there… 🙄🤦🏻‍♂️😏 )

Rough Night, Rough Day

Not a great day today. Was only able to get about three or four hours of sleep, and during those few hours I had two distinctly awful nightmares. First one had me inside a somewhat empty mall that was having its grand opening during the middle of the night. Everything was high tech, including the bathrooms – which for some reason, had circular, computerized urinals that all the guys had to share in the middle of the room.

This is gross, but it’s all just dream fodder, so yeah… for whatever reason, I ended up pissing blood, freaking out everyone else in the bathroom, to the point where alarms started going off as if I had done something wrong and someone was coming to get me. I left the restrooms and went into the main area of the mall, which was still mostly empty, so I could look for a doctor’s office or urgent care center. While I was doing this, I noticed that mall employees were following me – and sometimes actually running ahead of me, like they were making sure that I didn’t touch or contaminate any of the new things in the new stores in their new mall. One guy even said so. He said he was supposed to make sure that I just left the property, but that he wasn’t going to force me.

Woke up around that point for about a half hour, but when I fell back to sleep it basically picked back up with the same general plot and activities. Instead of a mall, it was now a fancy “state park” type lodge, the alarms were still going off, and every elevator that I tried to get onto was already filled with people who were fleeing the building. I was able to find a service elevator though, despite it only being big enough for one person to stand in, so I was at least able to make it to the ground floor and out into the park.

It was still the middle of the night, so the parking lots were the only areas that were dimly lit by creepy, flickering, florescent lightning. But all of the cars had been towed away for some reason. As I stood in the empty parking lot, the distance between me and the lodge began to expand… and before I knew it I was alone in the middle of the woods and the only thing I could make of the lodge was a few lights far off in the distance. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear people shouting for their kids, wondering where everyone went… and then I woke up from that one as well.

And yeah, I know there’s no way to ever describe your dreams in a way that can make other people “see” or feel what you were experiencing… but they were shitty dreams, just take my word for it. So I woke up early, my mood was shit, my energy was shot, but I could see that the beast was visibly annoyed by some itchin’ on her butt – so I used my little bit of energy to brush her out, comb out a few fleas, and then start grooming her with the shaver – this time, sans guard.

I had already made a nekkid spot on her neck to put the flea treatment, but to give them as little area to hide as possible I decided to go ahead and start trimming her shorter than I ever have before. She still loves the attention, and I think she knows and appreciates what I’m trying to do for her. (It’ll still be a couple day process though.) And even knowing that, I still had to take an unwanted nap in the afternoon.

But since she does have some fleas, and flea dirt – each time she lets me spend a few minutes erasing big sections of fur, I then have to sweep it all up with the broom, and then vacuum the rest up with the vacuum (which is working again, yay) so I can eliminate as many of the little buggers as I can. It sounds like nothing, but it’s using up every drop of energy that I’ve had today. And of course getting her back, chest, and neck is pretty easy – so that’s what I’ve hit first – but I’ve still got belly, legs, and butt yet to go… and I just don’t think I’ve got the oomph to finish it all tonight.

Hopefully sleep will come easier, and she’s already happier with what I’ve gotten done so far, so she’ll be fine waiting for tomorrow for the rest of it… if tomorrow is even enough time. Depends on what kind of mood she’s in and what kind of night I have tonight. But if that’s the worst of my complaints for today, I guess that’s not too bad. Meh. Unrelated question, as I watch the end of the Bristol truck race tonight… did they even sell tickets to this thing? Just noticed as they were taking the checkered flag that the place looked literally absolutely empty in the areas of the stands I was seeing.

Here Comes The Rain Again

It was interesting, yesterday at the pharmacy, as I tried to get all of my medications processed through the proper insurer, etc. When the lady told me that one of my WC meds had been denied again, I sort of jokingly apologized for my situation being such a pain in the ass for them each month – and said that I could pay cash for it and hope to be able to get a refund once it does get approved, but that I was sure there are probably dozens of other customers just like me and that I didn’t want to be even more hassle than I already had to be. 😏 The interesting part, and this isn’t the first time that someone there has at least hinted this towards me… but she said that in general, they don’t have many problems with workers comp customers, and was surprised (looking at my records in their system) how I seem to have the same trouble almost every month. 🤨😒 So it’s nice to feel like the complaints in my head are justified, but it doesn’t help when I want to reassure myself that it’s “nothing personal” against me. 🙄 Yeah, the appointment coming up this week, the requirement that my WC adjuster be contacted personally to approve the same meds I’ve been taking for years and years… it’s hard to pretend like it’s all a coincidence. 😞

But in the evening I managed to fall asleep relatively early, and then woke up in a cold sweat about an hour later after another awful nightmare. 😥 Dad and I were out on Shepherd Hill, it was late in the evening, a storm was blowing in, and we were walking along the fence-line of the property… where everything was all overgrown, as if our houses there had been abandoned. 🤨 My cousin Jim was at our house, and was helping to pack up all of our valuable things before the storm hit… but Dad and I were still out in the cold and wind, looking for Mom. 😟 As it turned out, she was actually out in the garage, making a safe space for all the kittens to hide and safely ride out the storm.

By this point Jim, Uncle Jay, and some others had already taken their carloads of things and left, and Dad and I were trying to get Mom to come inside the house so we could get the last of our things and then leave as well. But having grown up in that house, she didn’t want to leave… and as the storm hit, it turned into a tornado. Pieces of the walls started giving way, window were breaking, parts of the floor were being pried up from the beams and thrown into the air, and the three of us took shelter in the doorway between the foyer and the kitchen – and could only watch as the house was being torn down around us. 😢

It was then that I woke up… so I didn’t actually “go through” the worst of what would have happened if I had stayed in that dream, but it was close enough. And it was one of those dreams that felt so real that the noise and wind blowing from the fan in my room… it took me a few seconds to realize / remember that it was just my fan, and not that storm blowing things around still. Luckily I’m still exhausted… not only from the past few days, but also from that nightmare… so I think I’m gonna be able to go back to sleep fairly easily. I just hope I don’t drop right back into that dream.

That’s one of my “talents” that I usually appreciate… being able to “resume” interrupted dreams, or having dreams that take place in certain fictional locations, but locations that are always the same in my dreams, making them seem as real as if I was sitting on my porch and looking out at my back yard. It’s usually a comforting feeling to have these made up, but specific dream “destinations” over multiple decades… but that’s not even how it was this time. This was our old house, it was the house that Mom grew up in, and it was too fucking real. 😣 I have “good” Mom and Dad dreams too, but I’m really learning to hate these bad ones.

Used to be I could be screwed up during the day for whatever reason, but at least I could count on “sleep” as a time where no matter how stressed, depressed, or screwed up I was feeling during the day – it would all go away at night. But these past couple of months, more often than not, the “twitchy” of the day just follows me into my dreams. A lot of days when I wake up, my first thought is “I can’t wait until this day is over so I can go back to sleep.” but, at least right now, I can’t even say that and mean it. 😞

I’m tired, boss…