Posts Tagged ‘Perceptions’
Reasons
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little known
indistinguishable
reasons for feeling—
…subtle
like hammers
only soft ones
wield incidental influence
thorny
noticeable
lovely
annoying
vastly underrated
interminably hyperbolic
and endlessly hard
to ignore
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Ponder This
Time changes everything. Time has a tendency of changing my memories. I’ve been told that each time I remember something, the memory morphs a little bit.
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When I mentally visualize plans for the future, the conjured perceptions in my mind have the same “look” to me as when I am revisiting my memories.
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What if, in the present moment, I imagine a future occasion where I re-experience something I remember from the past?
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Dream World
Last night, I dreamed about discovering a submarine that demanded investigation. I and two unidentified persons ran a camera-like device around the perimeter in search of information. We pushed it as far as possible around one direction, and then switched around from the other direction.
There we found a window port, and I thought to grab a flashlight that Cyndie and I keep on the end of one counter in our kitchen. Dreams can be so convenient that way.
I shined the light into the submarine, and though seeing only emptiness similar to a sea bottom, which coincidentally looked a lot like the bottom of our landscape pond where I was mucking about last night to clean the input filter on the pump —no fish remains detected— my light beam got the attention of an occupant. A man approached the window.
He said his name was Bob. I identified myself and our party. For the life of me, I can’t recall the names I gave him for the two unidentified characters with me. I feel like one of them was Cyndie, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t name her as such.
I told Bob that it was 2016 and he said he was from 2066.
Later in the dream, because I have already lost some of the detail in my awakened state, this most memorable situation occurred. Bob taught me how to move through matter. We were against a solid wall, kneeling, I believe. He was describing how it wasn’t actually solid and there is space between atoms, as he moved his hands and head through the wall.
I held up my hands with fingers outstretched and moved them toward the wall. They broke the surface like it was water, with only a slightly increased resistance. As they moved into it, I pressed my head through, where I could then see Bob’s hands and head protruding beside me.
I remember feeling a wave of sensation washing through my whole body as I breached the wall.
This morning, I’m more inclined to feel the “wall” was the barrier between awake and asleep. I love that I was able to reach into my awake reality of our kitchen to get the flashlight to help in my asleep world beside a submarine deep under water.
Feel free to psycho-analyze this, but realize that I am the only one who can understand what this means to me. Right now, I am enjoying how easily I was accepting the possibility that a person from 50 years in the future was talking with me and teaching me how to do something supernatural.
And that I was a successful student.
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Feels Like
I don’t know if it is universal around the globe, but our weather reports include a “feels like” temperature along with the actual air temperature readings. Most people don’t need to be told what it feels like. We know when it feels like the gales of November even though the calendar indicates we are in the last week of April.
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There have been enough days of increased daylight, and a few early days of spring when the temperature climbed above normal, that plants and grasses have kicked off their growth. On Tuesday, when I got home from work, I mowed about 3/4s of our grass areas. It was so chilly outside that I needed a sweatshirt, but the growth of grass down by the road was enough that I didn’t want to wait.
I figured I would finish getting the remaining portions of yard cut when I got home yesterday, if it wasn’t raining. That didn’t turn out to be the case. There were a few random spatters on my windshield during the drive, and as I neared home, I could see the falling rain in the sky to the south.
The cool temperatures and falling rain were enough reason to let the horses have a night indoors. Cyndie headed out into the chill to prepare their stalls. When she invited them inside, she described Legacy, the herd leader, started toward her and then paused.
She said it was as if he was uncertain whether he was getting an afternoon chance for grazing the new green grass out in the pasture, or was just being offered shelter from the elements.
The other three horses needed to halt their advance while he sorted this out. Cyndie said they weren’t being very patient about it, circling around in anticipation of continuing on to the barn, but also trying to respect Legacy’s not yet authorizing the choice.
Cyndie described Hunter eventually showing a look indicating he was done waiting. He and Cayenne came up to the gate to get inside. Responding to Hunter’s initiative, Cyndie let him come inside first. Once inside and alone, Hunter called out over being separated from his mates. Cyndie said that Legacy immediately responded with an acknowledging whinny.
She brought Legs next, followed by Dezirea, and then Cayenne.
Back in the house, we sat in front of the fire and listened to the ferocious sound of wind and rain, pleased that the horses weren’t stuck outside where they could find out what the weather actually felt like.
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This Happens
In the morning, our wake up call comes from Delilah. She sleeps in a crate beneath the spiral stairs in the main room. During my work week, when I leave the house in the early morning darkness, she regularly ignores me and stays quiet until around 7 or 7:30, if Cyndie is lucky.
It’s not exactly uncommon for Delilah to start getting vocal more than an hour earlier than desired. When it is way too early, I discovered that if one of us moves to the couch behind her crate and lays down to sleep, she will usually go back to sleep, too.
This morning was one of the occasions where it wasn’t so extremely early that it was still dark outside, but it was earlier than either of us wanted to wake up, after having stayed up a bit late last night because it was, after all, a Saturday. Cyndie, being less inclined toward sleeping on the couch for the dog, got up and let Delilah out of her crate. Then Cyndie came back to bed, hoping to get a few more minutes of shuteye before getting up for real.
That practice is based on the willingness of Delilah to calm down again after having just stretched out in expectation of starting her day. She puts her feet on the bed to check on me, she paces a bit and pants loudly. If we are lucky, she recognizes the situation and walks in a tight circle about 6 times and lays down to give us a little added slumber.
Then this happens… I realize that I have to pee.
Go figure. I am desperately trying to stay in my sleep mode, and the dog has just indicated she is willing to gift us with precious added time. I don’t have to go to work, I can sleep as long as possible, but my bladder is asking for relief.
Since I am tired, it is possible to override the body signals long enough to regain unconsciousness. It could be blissful, except for one thing. The body has its own intelligence, and it doesn’t give up without additional effort.
You know the drill. I was dreaming that it was time to leave and people were waiting for me, but before I could leave with them, I needed to use the bathroom. Actually, I think there were several bathrooms involved in this morning’s dream. Of course, a toilet couldn’t be found in any of them.
I dreamed I was peeing into something where I had mistakenly placed a kitchen utensil I had just used. Then I was peeing into a tub that had been placed where a toilet was supposed to be, but it turned out to be filled with plastic building block toys. In that case, the door was not latched and my niece’s young son wandered in, with her right behind. Soon she was commenting on my choice of receptacle.
It’s like being stuck in a labyrinth that has no end.
After Delilah decided we had enough extra time, she woke us again, interrupting my troubled sleep and freeing me from my self-inflicted imaginary dramas.
That was a relief for my mind which then, finally, allowed relief for my body.
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Yes, Shingles
For all the personal detail I freely display in my posts on a regular basis, I found myself holding back recently from blathering on about the daily progress of my shingles outbreak. I think part of it was a hope of saving you from frequently repeated lamentations over the pain and suffering I was enduring, but another part of it was my plan to give this affliction as little attention as possible. My intent was to get over this quickly and with a minimum of symptoms.
It all started on the Monday after I had trimmed dead wood from our apple tree and a nearby maple tree, using a pruning saw on an extended pole. It seemed entirely logical that I would feel sore muscles in the area of my torso after the workout I had done the day before. Upon a feeling of even more stiffness the next day, I became more assured my discomfort was a function of delayed onset muscle soreness from the weekend’s exercise.
By Wednesday I was growing normalized to the soreness and stopped thinking about it. After my shower in the evening, I noticed a red spot on my abdomen, but it didn’t mean much to me at the time. However, it seemed odd when the redness was still there the next morning. Without previously having had the slightest inkling that I might be getting sick, when I saw the spot still present in the morning, I reacted by lifting my arm and turning in the mirror.
How did I suddenly know?
There were enough splotches in a line around to my back that I instantly thought, “Shingles.” When I got to work I did a little research and checked in with my clinic back in Wisconsin. They directed me to immediately visit an urgent care site near my workplace. The doctor there did little more than listen to my description and look at my torso before confirming my self-diagnosis.
She prescribed an anti-viral to be taken 3-times a day for a week, to minimize and hopefully shorten the duration of my symptoms. She asked what I knew about shingles and began to describe the varying levels of hell that can occur.
I interrupted her to say that I did read that some people may not have severe symptoms. When she nodded in acknowledgement, I proclaimed that I would be one of those people, so she didn’t need to bother describing the worst it could get.
For the most part, I would say I achieved my goal of not having the rash erupt in multiple waves of increasing severity. It got worse for about 3 days and then began to slowly recede. There is still some residual visual evidence left, but my skin is mostly healed. The deep (what felt like muscle) pain was a chronic annoyance for about 2-and-a-half weeks, but seems to be fading now.
I’m so close to being done with it that I want to claim victory. There is just one small problem. Even though I succeeded in willing myself to the easy end of the shingles spectrum, it appears that I am getting a good dose of a common complication: post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN).
The most common complication of shingles is a condition called post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN). People with PHN have severe pain in the areas where they had the shingles rash, even after the rash clears up.
The pain from PHN may be severe and debilitating, but it usually resolves in a few weeks or months in most patients. Some people can have pain from PHN for many years. ——–cdc.gov/shingles/about/complications
I wouldn’t exactly call what I am feeling as pain. It is more a hyper-sensitivity. At times, it feels like a sunburn on my skin. Other times it feels “crawly” like having a fever. I get frequent shivers, and the act of shivering is uncomfortable. I want to avoid it, but I can’t.
So it’s that kind of pain. Not so much a “hurt,” as a very uncomfortable nuisance.
Yes, that’s my version of shingles.
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Relative Something 