gawd… if i could tell that damn mr sandman character to back the hell off and stop giving me dreams i would.

part of the “management” regime of my heart trouble has been the issuing of verapamil, a drug of some kind that helps the old ticker maintain a regular rhythm. it’s a good thing, as i discovered last weekend when i had to stop taking it for a two days, and collect a big bottle of wee. i was reduced to lying on the couch and reading, ensuring the whole time that i was doing these breathing exercises to calm the heart. the wee collection was to test if i am actually having my head flooded with adrenaline each time the heart ramps up past normal.

anyhow, enough medical talk. while i appreciate the control the drugs are giving, they are having a number of small side effects, all of which centre on sleep.

i’ve always been a light sleeper, and the drugs haven’t effected that, but they do sometimes result in slight insomnia. meaning that on days like today i can go to bed at a respectable hour, but will wake up at ungodly times and simply cannot return to sleep. 6am! on a saturday!

the second and more interesting side effect is incredibly intense dreaming. i’d say nightmares, but they’re only occasionally frightening. the more usual pattern is for me to drop off to sleep, and then dream heavily and continuously until i awake. some days it’s as if my mind hasn’t rested at all, and two distinct days will kind of “blur” into each other. fortunately it’s not effecting me other than to make some days a little longer than others, to make me a little grumpy at times, and to make me a bit stupid others.

the third one is memory loss. i’ve always been absent minded. but i’m starting to notice that my short-term memory is increasingly shonky. now, you might attribute this to a “rock and roll” lifestyle when i was younger. but, it wasn’t that rock and roll, despite my own hype. i’ll talk to the cardiologist about these things when i finally get to talk to one on June 18.

not bad for the public health system. 18 months to see a specialist! yay! not!

so, the dreaming. well, it’s both fun and not fun. sometimes it’s just a weeny bit intense. sometimes however, it’s a laugh. the time i was sitting on a couch trying to convince a huge family of sikhs (sitting a couch opposite mine) of the benefits of renewable energy was such a laugh. they weren’t having a bar of it.

another great one was dreaming that i was walking through melbourne, and i jumped a fence to take a short-cut. i ended up walking through someone’s house, and was trying to sneak past their kitchen when someone calls out, “hey!! long-time no see!”. it turns out that i was having a dream where i caught up with a family i’d dreamt about at some other time. the kids had grown bigger and they’d built and extension on the house. they were doing ok. they fed me, we sat around and chatted, they wished me well, and i resumed the journey. weird.

trying to sort thru and “supermodel revival kit”, a huge chilli bin full of multi-coloured bottles of tonic water, and about 5 varieties of scotch was incredible. so, so many vivid colours. as was watching a blue meteor impact in some distant hills in another dream. this copper-sulphate blue wave of colour spread from that impact across the hills and passed me, and an elderly woman i was watching, lighting us both up before the wave-front passed.

and last night? can’t remember it all, other than working with a gang member to save his kids from a commune where they didn’t treat kids so good, i dreamt i was in wooden ship. a cannon-ball is fired from another ship, and it passes through the hull and impacts a stanchion (?) on the other side of the hull, which bows outwards wanting to collapse. the water pressure outside the hull pushes back, and the hull explodes inwards filling the boat with water.

intense, and woke me up at 6am.