twitchcraft galore

I.
My nose is a river, its source a burgeoning waterfall deep inside the chasm of my sinuses. I have gone through at least two rolls of toilet paper already, seeing as I’m having to expel mucous from my face every two minutes. The doctor says I have a sinus infection, but there must be something else going on since my lungs and throat feel weary with unwelcome crowds of sick.

The nurse took one of those extra-long Q-tips and jammed it up my left nostril. It burned so badly, my hands involuntarily moved up to grab her. Oops. The flu test was negative, though, so I guess that’s a relief. Time to laze around in my apartment, fall in and out of sleep, and get comfortable with my Kleenex.

II.
My lungs are heavy and their hijackers, nasty buggers, will not come out no matter how much my throat pleads. So much pleading, in fact, that my voice has pretty much disappeared. My poor cat keeps talking to me, but alas, I cannot answer her insistent meows. She just looks at me, frustrated. I take a hot shower and she drinks water from the faucet and I stand and stare blankly at the yellow tiles.

Four days have passed and I am only getting worse. My mom takes me back to the doctor, and I am sent to the lab for an encore of large Q-tips being jammed into my nostrils, along with several vials of blood being taken from my arm, and some X-rays on my head and chest. I have the flu. Most likely the swine flu.

My boss and my chef instructor are not happy that I will be gone all week, but they do not protest. Nobody else wants to get sick, and I don’t blame them. This shit sucks.

III.
My mother is a saint. Anything I need, medicine, food, tissues. She brings them to me, and even brings me surprises. She sits with me and helps me with what I need. She takes her Tamiflu so she doesn’t get sick from me, and she hasn’t complained once. I don’t know what I would have done without her this week.

I am working from home today, since there are crises to be averted and I am the only one who can do it. At least I am being somewhat helpful. It’s a change, at least. I was getting tired of watching Family Feud. I have never seen so many high-fives in all my life as in one episode of that show. One week has gone and I am still bedridden. Bored and drowsy and coughing and coughing.

IV.
My living room is a swamp. I wade through her mucky murk in an attempt to save my electronic devices, just barely now touching her damp surface. I go upstairs to my closet to get some clean clothes and realize that my second floor has also transformed into a squishy pool. This is just exactly what I was hoping to encounter at 11:00 pm, in the midst of dealing with the flu.

It has been raining since yesterday and apparently water has collected on the roof, after the roofer men have torn it apart and not yet fixed it (four days ago). Lucky me (and the other tenants in this building) now get to experience super leakage on two floors of our homes.

V.
My kitchen is a library. My grey sweater rests across the back of an office chair, pushed into the dark back corner next to the fridge. Books are piled up on every available surface, while the empty bookcase stands in the middle of the narrow space. The rest of my living room has been pushed together, squished up against the fireplace and the front door. My closet has been emptied out into my bedroom. Things are everywhere. In complete disarray.

They are removing the carpet padding and vacuuming up the water. There is a very loud fan blowing the carpet dry. I am told that I will have to wait until next week for them to come back and finish the job. I am also told not to move anything until the carpet is finished. Oh good, because I was hoping to live like this for a while, you know, just to change things up.

VI.
My lungs, not yet recovering from the flu, are now being treated to a heavy dose of musty air. My cat is excited because all the windows are open. I have put together a makeshift area in a corner of the mess so that I can set up my computer again. I have read three books already this week, and have just bought three more to keep me company, although now I just want to go to sleep. My Tamiflu is all gone, but the bottle of cough medicine (with codeine) is still very full.

Let’s talk about dreams and recurrences. Some people have recurring dreams where the exact same dream gets repeated on multiple occasions. For people like me, however, it is more like recurring themes, places, and people in dreams. I think the strangest types of dreams I have are the kind of … serial ones. Dreams that continue over long periods of time (real time, not dream time). Almost like a TV show coming in episodes, only the episodes are my dreams, and I am IN the show. Sometimes the dreams feel so real that when I wake up, I have trouble differentiating my waking life from that of my dream life.

I’ve come to understand that some of my most vivid dreams are hypnopompic hallucinations, and some are night terrors induced by sleep paralysis. But we’ll talk about that another time. Right now we’re talking about recurring and serial dreams. In fact, I think I am just going to turn this into a new category of bloggery because this could get lengthy. Today I’ll talk about one specific recurring theme (with a few others interlaced throughout).

Kidnapping & Evil Twins
Creepy Uncle
When I was little, I often had dreams of someone trying to kidnap me. I suppose this could be called a recurring theme, because each time the scenery and circumstances were different, but the premise was that I had to hide from a kidnapper who was coming to get me. The one I remember most vividly was the one where I actually almost got kidnapped. He actually saw me and was coming after me, and almost touched me before I woke up. The creepiest part was that he looked a lot like my uncle, only this was a creepier version of my uncle.

This same creepy version of my uncle made another appearance in one of my kidnapper dreams. In the dream, I was at my school at night (I must have been about 5 years old at the time) and I was sneaking around the classrooms trying to hide from the kidnapper. I came into one classroom and he saw me and shot me right in the heart. I woke up kind of horrified (but not exactly scared), and my chest was stinging in the spot where he had shot me. That is the only time I have ever dreamed of being hurt or killed. I still remember every detail of that dream and the way it felt when he shot me.

The weird thing is that I was never remotely afraid of this uncle. I didn’t see him often and thus didn’t know him well, but he never frightened me in the least!

Creepy Dad
One of the most abundant themes in my dreams when I was little was a scene where my dad would be trying to keep me away from my mom. Each time, I was at home with my mom (I was really little, maybe 3 or 4?), and I would be sitting with her while she did some mundane task like folding laundry. Then my dad would come in the room and stare at me with these creepy eyes.

My dad is a short black man, and people used to say he looked like Sherman Helmsley (from The Jeffersons). But in my dream he looked like a cross between himself and Bill Cosby, only not even slightly comical. He was all serious and scary as hell. Nothing was ever spoken in those dreams. Just silence, my mom going about her business not noticing anything, and my dad coming in giving me the evil stare. I knew that he was going to try and take me away from my mom and I was scared and didn’t want him to take me from her. He would do everything just to get in my way while I tried to get closer to her, or to prevent her from coming to me.

I hated those dreams, and even thinking back on them now gives me the shivers. I can still see that face clearly and it was so scary. Again, I don’t know why I would have dreamed about this, let alone very frequently. My dad was always jolly and just doted on us kids. I was never scared of him in the least, and loved the little bit of time I got to spend with him (at that time he worked 2 jobs and when he was home he was usually sleeping). I told my folks about these dreams many years later and they found it weird, too.

Creepy Grandfather
This one happened maybe a few months ago. It is the only time I recall ever dreaming about my grandfather, he had died about two years before I had this dream. Most of the dream wasn’t memorable at all, until the end. I was standing there and he came up to me, only the closer he got, the more I began to realize that this wasn’t my grandfather but a scary version of him. I hesitated, but he just came up to me and put his arms around me, from the side.

I tried to get away, but he just began squeezing me tighter and tighter. I was half-awake at this point and realized I couldn’t move. I tried to cry out to my cat, who I could see sitting at the foot of my bed (yet I could still clearly see and feel creepy-grandpa squeezing me). I couldn’t even make a sound. I couldn’t even breathe. Obviously, this was sleep paralysis, and I realized it, but it still creeped me out and I just had to let it run its course (which, thankfully, didn’t last more than a minute or so).

Final Thoughts?
By now I’m sure you’re seeing a common theme throughout even these recurrences. These three are the only evil twins I’ve ever dreamed about. Sure I may dream of evil versions of people I know, but these people all happen to be older male relatives. Wtf’s up with that?

Over the past seven years or so I have been having somewhat prophetic dreams at an increasing rate. What I find interesting is that they come in a variety of ways. Sometimes they are blunt and straight to the point, and upon waking I find them almost ridiculous – but they turn out to be the truth of a situation in my life. Sometimes they are so cryptic I almost dismiss them at first! I’ll henceforth refer to my meaningful dreams as Dreams (which is basically how I see them in my head – capitalized).

So you don’t think I’m crazy or just trying too hard to have some sort of psychic power, I’ll give you a couple examples of these Dreams. Coincidentally, a large percentage of my Dreams involve my best friend, which could just mean that she and I are connected on a very deep level.

Dream #1
My best friend has a new boyfriend, which is great, but all she seems to be doing is spending all her time making out with him and ignoring everyone else in her life.
At the time of this Dream, I was living a few hours away from her, and we didn’t get a chance to speak very often. I hadn’t spoken to her in months, so I found it odd that I would have dreamed this about her. A few days later, I called her to tell her about my Dream. Her response? “That’s kinda funny because I actually do have a boyfriend now and we do pretty much act like that.” She was surprised by my Dream, and I was surprised by what she told me (up until that point she hadn’t had a boyfriend in years)!

Dream #2
My best friend is having bad headaches. She is very disoriented and I need to take care of her.
Again, I hadn’t talked to her in a few months, because that’s just the way it happens with us sometimes. A few days later, she called me and informed me of the horrendous news: she was in the hospital with a huge brain tumor. A few days leading up to that, she had been having bad headaches and wasn’t feeling well – a seizure is what brought her into the emergency room that day.
Side Note: During this time is when I started having all my health issues, including strange head pains, etc. For a long time, my mother insisted that all of this was basically me having “sympathy pains” for my friend. Turns out I actually had a medical condition causing the symptoms, but the Dream was right on target.

In the past year especially I have been having Dreams very frequently. So frequently that I sometimes have trouble digesting one dream before I get another one to ponder over. One of my most recent ones was about myself this time, and it was so profound that I am still reeling over it.

The Chiron Dream
I was at some sort of social gathering – a circus, perhaps? – and all of my friends, colleagues, family, and a good bit of strangers were there. I was making my way through the crowds, keeping myself somehow isolated – just me and This Man. He was caring for me, helping to steer me through the crowds, and my field of vision seemed focused only on the two of us. I could tell that he loved me and would do anything to take care of me. With him I felt safe, confident, and was able to avoid the distractions all around me.

When I awoke, I found the dream strange and pretty much dismissed it as a normal dream because This Man looked just like a friend of mine. But it kept coming back to the forefront of my mind, and it was like someone was whispering in my ear “Chiron… Chiron… Chiron.” Finally, I knew. I saw the correlation. This Man looked just like my good friend who is an astrologer and named his practice after Chiron. I knew that This Man was not my friend, but the embodiment of Chiron.

Immediately, I began researching Chiron. The first website I came to had this to say:

Chiron is a comet with a unique and erratic orbit. In the natal chart, Chiron is symbolized by the “wounded healer”. It represents our deepest wound, and our efforts to heal the wound. Chiron was named after the centaur in Greek mythology who was a healer and teacher who, ironically, could not heal himself.

Chiron in our natal charts points to where we have healing powers as the result of our own deep spiritual wounds. We may over-compensate in these areas of life. Chiron, as a wounded healer, first must face issues of low self-worth and feelings of inadequacy and learn to rise above these issues. Because the wound goes deep, and we may work hard to overcome the wound, healing powers are potent.

Folks, I was blown away. To you it may mean nothing, but to me it was like a very large kick in the stomach, a shove on the shoulders, a slap in the face. Because it was so profoundly speaking directly to ME and the exact point I was in at my life (and still AM in) that I was in shock. I have never had a Dream so blatantly speak to me about myself. It was incredible, and I am still trying to make the best of what it said to me. I am optimistic, for certain, and it feels good.

Since that Dream, I have had a few more Dreams as well. They’re just flowing like crazy now!