hallucinogen
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
I've been dreaming a lot lately. Only just recently.
Last night I woke up from two bad dreams, nothing frightening, but surely unsavory. The worst was when I was doing duty last week, on the 6th.
The bunk bed that I sleep in is something I've always nicknamed a coffin, because that's about how big it looks like. Tall enough to just prop your pillow up 45 degrees, and long enough just to give my feet around 10cm more space after having fully laid down, the restrictiveness of the triple decker is something we get used to after a while.
Having finished my watch that night at 0030, I washed up and went to bed, and I recall dreaming that I was going into some dark, metal shaft or cabinet that could just nicely fit me. Something needed an inspection, and my buddy from the outside, person unknown, had opened the door for me. The intention was for him to leave the door ajar so light could enter.
For some reason, though, he promptly shut the door and twisted the lock, whereupon metal bars not unlike those you see in banks extended upwards and downwards. Not a sliver of light could be seen.
That was when I immediately kicked at the door, which rang with noise as it reverberated, calling out at the same time for the person to unlock the door. I had been kicking at it for some time before I awoke in a semi-conscious state, and that was when I realised I was actually kicking at the foot of my bed, where a wall stood that separated the cabin from the toilet. Just as the metal door in the dream, this wall was also made of light metal, and with each kick that I was delivering to it, it gave hollow but sufficiently loud thuds.
I quickly stopped, of course, but by then I realised I had been kicking at it for a few seconds even as I was semi-conscious. I wonder how many people in my bunk had heard that but just kept quiet. There were four sharing the bunk with me that night of duty.
The next day, I woke up and found that my self-made cardboard shelf at the foot of my bed was broken, and some of my things were on the floor.
I don't know what to make of the dream, I tried to interpret it as I always do, but the actual kicking kind of makes me feel it's got some deeper manifestation to it than usually meets the eye. Maybe I'm over-thinking it. There were times before, as I'm sure I've mentioned, where my repeated act of doing something significant or special very soon before sleeping makes me have hallucinations of doing it in a semi-conscious state. One where I constantly snap myself out of it, but quickly fall back into the hallucination when I start sleeping. Like the once when I worked late dinner hours in the Italian restaurant Amici in Holland Village. I'd hallucinate when in bed the same nights that I was waiting on tables, and when I snap myself out of it, I'd not really be able to remember if my hand was really outstretched.
It's all quite disturbing, really.
***
On another note, I"ll be visiting a TCM physician in a few weeks' time. My mom arranged it for me as she felt that it's finally time I just see if Chinese medicine could do anything long term to help my chronic flu problem. This physician is supposed to be someone highly sought after, and I really hope that it can help cure this irksome problem.
I never actually realised it until a friend pointed out to me, that I often have sniffs as pauses in-between my words as if they're an in-built punctuation mark. It's just been too often that I hear that coming from myself to actually think about it. My mom says I got it from her, she used to be able to get a sneezing fit just from stepping off a bus, from an air conditioned environment to a non-air conditioned environment. She grew out of it, but I don't intent to wait till much longer to see if I'd grow out of it too.
Labels: dreams, thoughts
posted by joseph at 7:07 PM