ICU psychosis
At this hour, the hot & black is decaf, but I ate a bite of dark chocolate brownie, and two tiny chocolates wrapped in tinsel, before I realized that they may keep me awake. I should have had a slice of bread with jam instead, eh?
The nonsensical repetitive dream: I remember it. The world was coming to an end and IRS demanded that everyone file their income tax return before it happened. I filed mine, but then someone else, I think it was Gina, my sister, filed mine again but with all sorts of erroneous information. The IRS came to audit me, I tried to explain that they were auditing an erroneous, duplicate return, and that I'd filed mine correctly, but they couldn't understand that and kept at the audit and questions, ad infinitum, the dream wouldn't let go of my brain.
Lately I've had these won't-quit dreams at least a couple Times a week, for weeks and weeks or maybe a couple of months now. The frantic dream is different every Time, but always miserably distressing.
I well remember the first one, the first Time I had one. It was January 2011 while I was in the ICU after open heart surgery at Cleveland Clinic. Over and over again, it wouldn't go away. It had two parts. In one part an unstoppable, deafeningly loud orchestra or band was playing "Deutschland Uber Alles" over and over and over and over and ... mixed with that, my father's brother, my uncle Alfred was in Annie & Jennie, had rounded Davis Point and was headed for the Old Pass, and I was trying to get him on my cell phone to warn him to come back, but he wasn't answering his cell phone because there was no cell phone service there, over and over and over again, stirred in to the tune of Deutschlandlied. It was an insanity even as I kept waking up, knowing it was nonsense, but falling back asleep into it repetitively, seemingly all night long.
It didn't change my dream that the wreck of the Annie & Jennie that caused Alfred's death had occurred in January 1918 nearly twenty years before I was born. In my dream I was frantic to get him on the phone before they sailed into the storm.
A retired nurse friend who was my parishioner at both Grace Church and St Thomas by the Sea told me it was common, that it was called "ICU psychosis." Looking back at the Time, I could see why that dream. For one, I have a sensitivity that borders on guilt about living my life because of the death of Alfred, whom my grandparents loved so dearly and grieved lifelong. As for the song, the timing was still in the phase when I had learned to my horror that my ancestry was German instead of English as I'd always been told when I was growing up.
And without going deeper there in public, I don't need a dream therapist to work out why these repetitive dreams since I turned ninety years of age. Knowing doesn't change that they keep returning and make for a most miserable night's sleep though.
Why am I telling this private thing about myself? IDK, maybe because I need to get it out by setting it down in writing, but I don't journal, I've never kept a diary, and this, my +Time weblog, is the only place I have to say stuff like this.
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What then? At church this morning it'll be the Last Sunday after Pentecost, which some years ago the Pope designated Christ the King Sunday. My growing up years, the church called it The Sunday Next Before Advent with its doomsday readings. It was also called "Stir Up Sunday," when the church women were supposed to go home to stir up and bake the fruitcakes for the holiday season because of the then Collect for the Day,
STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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my ongoing theological contemplation: with two trillion galaxies in this Unvierse alone, each galaxy with an average of 3.2 trillion planets, how is it that the Pantokrator is mindful of me here on Earth? As Canon Bryan Green used to say, a speck a speck?