Migraines

Just a little thought today.

I have a migraine. It looks something like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/28/opinion/20080222_MIGRAINE_SLIDESHOW_index.html


Pick a picture, any picture. You'll have a small visual of what my day has been like. It kinda blows, but it's been my lot in life since I was THIRTEEN years old! That's a lot of life to suffer with migraines! But anyway... When I have a migraine, I get weird. Like WEIRD. Crazy creative, totally incapable of processing patterns and dealing with noise/light/stimuli/smells, totally quirky. And I realized something: in high school, my worst migraines would send me home. Some kept me in a dark, quiet room for days on end. What I realized is that people couldn't deal with me. They couldn't cope. No one understood why my right eye looked like it was closing or why I was hiding from the chemicals in the darkroom, but craving the dark room that the darkroom provided. Because I was quirky and silly and weird, it was one MORE reason to stay away. One MORE reason to avoid me...

I'm okay with it now. People do love me now and people do care and people do try to make it better. But migraines suck. They sucked when I was in high school and they sucked in college and they suck as a mommy. Just differently. Like I always say: not a different ball game, just a different inning.

On Dreams

There are few things in the world like early Fall - except the REST of Fall.
Today, this cloudy morning in September, I have so many thoughts running through me. I have been thinking about Dreams lately. What they mean, how they change me through the day, how they change my mornings...

My mom told me about a dream she had:
I was at a friend of your sister's funeral. It was so sad. I held onto this friend's mother and helped walk her down the aisle in the church. 

I told her that that wasn't a sad dream at all! It was a dream that reflects her concern for this friend and for her mother! My sister's friend has had some health issues lately and the dream reflects that my mom worries for my sister's friend and wants to support and help the friend's mother in any way she can. Probably not in a physical hold-her-up kind of way, but in a more emotional way. My mom heard me say this and was immediately relieved. I'm not sure that I believe in any kind of abilities of precognition (though some of my dreams might reflect otherwise). This dream of my mom's was more about her Brain trying to make sense of a deep underlying concern that she hasn't focused on in her waking moments enough.

I dream a lot. I remember my dreams. They are usually convoluted and elaborate. I remember most of my dreams because they mean so much to me. In the morning, I will usually find one on which to dwell, to hone in on what my subconscious is working on. I do believe that dreams are our subconscious' ways of processing information and the various stimuli that we encounter day to day, month to month.

Last night I dreamed about a person I haven't talked to or heard from in years. I dreamed that this person wanted me to play saxophone in a quintet - odd, since I don't play saxophone & have only held one once. I really didn't want to, and suggested that perhaps I should just bow out since not only can I not play sax, I've only had a handful of clarinet lessons (maybe a year, though in my dream I said 3). This dream has stayed with me today. I'm beginning to understand it, though it's going to take a lot of muddling through. I think I know what my subconscious is processing.

Dreams are so fascinating. The studies done on dreaming are hardly extensively written about, but they should be. Dreams really are the megaphones through which our brains scream answers at us. More on this later. I want to go think a little more about this dream, now that I know what I'm working with.