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Saturday, February 14, 2009

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream

There's a whole industry that's popped up around the subject of dreams. There are trained [and untrained] folks ready to help you analyze and interpret them. Just browse the internet for a minute or two and you can find scads of sites that deal with the topic in one way or another.

I tend not to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what my dreams mean. For one thing, I don't dream that much. One of the many aspects of my fibromyalgia is that I generally don't sleep long enough at a given time to enter the kind of sleep needed for dreaming and, even in short bursts, I rarely attain the level of deep sleep.

It hasn't always been this way. When I was far younger, I dreamed almost every night. As my condition has progressed, the dreams have faded. Nowadays it happens every once in awhile.

I awoke this morning to one of those rare occasions. I'm not going to share with you the particulars, but the main premise behind this dream has to do with my AS. The dream involved a recurrent theme in which I was supposed to be somewhere for an important event and, through a comedy of errors, I arrived far later than I was supposed to and turned away before anyone realized I was there.

In real life, because I loathe crowds, it is imperative that I arrive early so I can set up my safe haven and plans of escape (in case I become too discombobulated). Once other people show up and start milling around, I become very nervous. If I don't arrive early enough -- I'm often the first person there -- I end up not going in at all because I simply lose my nerve.

I'm fairly sure I know what sparked this dream. My wife & I will need to travel to Portland, Oregon next week to pick up our virtually new car. While I'm excited finally to have reliable transportation, I'm just as horrified that I have to go to a large city to get it!

Mind you, when I lived in Salem, I went to Portland frequently, though not always willingly. But it's quite a different thing traveling to a metro area of around 1 million from a mid-sized city of 200,000 than it is making the same trip from a hamlet of 1,750!! Heck, there are more people and cars in almost any given Portland neighborhood than in my entire county!

Today's modern large cities boasts a highway system -- often an interstate -- that is like quasi-controlled chaos. Most people tend to drive faster than the posted speed limit and vehicles play a sort of musical chairs by changing lanes at the speed of light. For a person who likes things well-ordered and deliberate, I do not handle the traffic of large communities well at all.

Naturally, I'm becoming very anxious at the prospect of having to drive to and in Portland. Who knows? I may be having more strange dreams in the next few days.

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