It all comes rushing back

My dreams are an integral part of each 24 hour cycle. I don't view them in a voyeuristic sense, I see them as direct experience. They are lived, not watched like TV.
~ Nick Bantock

My father has some kind of a disc problem, and he's almost always in constant pain. He doesn't complain about it, but I know by the way he walks that he's hurting. I don't know whether I inherited a tendency to back pain from him or not; I don't think my brother or my sisters have it, and I don't know whether I have it chronically or not. My back doesn't hurt all the time, but I have "thrown it out" several times.

And never by doing anything in particular; one time I was sitting on the floor in front of my dresser cleaning out my sock drawer, one time I was just sitting at my desk doing nothing, and yesterday morning I just bent over and reached down to pick something up off the floor--something I do several times a day, every day--and when I straightened up, ZING.

As these episodes go, this one has been pretty mild. The sitting-at-the-desk time was the weirdest. It was so bad that I couldn't walk. Not that I could walk, but be in pain, but couldn't walk. I just couldn't make my muscles and nerves do their thing. I ended up lying on the floor in the storage room with my legs up the wall--a yoga posture that seemed to lessen the pain.

Sleeping last night was difficult because it hurt so much to turn over. It seemed no matter what position I took, I couldn't get comfortable. And I can't sleep in one position all night anymore. I almost always sleep on my side, but I switch probably every two hours or so because my hips hurt when I sleep on one side too long. I usually get up in the night a couple of times to go to the bathroom, and when I go back to bed, I remind myself to start out on the other side--the opposite to however I was lying when I woke up.

Last night when I got up, I got an extra pillow from the closet and put it between my knees, and that seemed to relieve some of the pressure on my back. It feels considerably better today, although when I woke up this morning I wasn't sure whether it was better or not. Back pain is so wierd. It always makes me wonder if we were really ever meant to walk upright.

One of the advantages of having a cold, and of having back pain that wakes me up, is that I remember my dreams. It's another reason I like to sleep with the windows open--it makes me sleep lighter, consequently I wake up more often, consequently I remember my dreams, since I guess I'm being woken up during REM periods. I don't know; the actual physiology of it doesn't interest me so much. But I do love to wake up and remember what I was dreaming.

I have a cool lighted notepad by the side of my bed. There's a pen in the top, and you pull out the pen and a light goes on that illuminates the notepad. The problem is always interpreting my handwriting in the morning . . . I try to be as clear and descriptive as possible, but I also don't want to wake completely up, so I tend to make cryptic notes and hope I'll remember what I was talking about when I try to decipher them. I'm not always, but sometimes just a word or two is enough to evoke a feeling, a mood, and it all comes rushing back.

I've never expected anyone else to be interested in my dreams, I simply record them because I don't want to lose them. Some of them are so vivid that it seems like I lived them rather than dreamed them, and writing them down enables me to re-live them any time I choose. Once I've written them down, I let them go. Then sometime, years later, I'll happen on one that I wrote down, and it's like I'm experiencing it all over again, a memory that seems so real it might have really happened.

And who's to say it didn't?