I experienced the so-called “Old Hag Syndrome”, otherwise known as Sleep Paralysis last night for the first time in my life, repeatedly, and I now understand why it is so horrifying to those who suffer this regularly.

It started with partially coming into consciousness believing my wife had returned home.  I felt movement on the bed, and then I thought she was crawling over me to get to the other side of the bed, except she didn’t move off of me, and it felt like a crushing pressure.  As I opened my eyes and realized nobody was there, I still felt this pressure and I couldn’t move.  At this point, even though I had never experienced this before, I’d read about it enough times to know what was going on and so I just kept trying to move, wiggle a finger, eventually my brain stem restored connectivity to the rest of my body, the pressure went away, and I could fully move.

However, as soon as I started to drift off to sleep, I’d feel the pressure come back on me as if someone had crawled up on the blankets.  I tried everything, different positions, taking off all of the blankets except the sheets, but every time I started to drift off to sleep it would come back.

Eventually, I tried to just embrace it, instead of thinking of someone trying to smoother me, I thought of when I was a young child and it was cold and I had extra blankets to keep warm, and the warmth and comfort they provided, and drifted back to sleep and the next time I awoke it was a normal awakening.

This stuff is still hanging on.  I stopped all the over the counter cold medications and that ended most of the neurological symptoms, i.e., skin on fire, things not really feeling right, etc, but the stuffy nose and sinuses and gross green gunk continue although the amount has been dropping off as the day has gone on.

I’m more than a little unhappy with the Washington State Health Planner website and people behind it.  I tried to sign up, couldn’t get it to complete.  Someone helped me and I was able to get it to save.  But then they said I needed to put in financial data, only I couldn’t find any place to do that, someone there said they’d call me back, twice, and didn’t, and now it’s the 15th and I’m pretty much screwed it would seem, all the while trying to struggle through this while sick.  Gotta love it.

And then there is the matter of Mae:

This dog was acquired by my wife and son, and I still don’t fully understand the agreement but my wife paid for it, but he pays for upkeep, while I was in prison.  I wasn’t real excited about this since I knew things would be financially tight, knew that I may or may not be able to hang on to the house and if not where would she go?  But I also knew my wife could use some companionship in my absence so I kind of folded.

Now I end up feeding her, watering her, letting her out most of the day because my wife will let her starve, dehydrate, or piss on the floor before she lets her out.  And one previous Doberman we had, Tia, chewed her paws until her knuckles were raw and bleeding, and according to the vet, this was because she was bored and apparently is a common bored Doberman trait.  The other day I caught Mae chewing her paws in the same way, hasn’t bloodied them yet but I don’t want it to come to that.

Since this is now our third Doberman my wife and son should have both been familiar with the breed.  They are a high energy dog that requires a lot of attention and unlike most breeds that start out this way as puppies, Dobermans are generally this way from birth until death.  I’m finding the whole situation frustrating, it’s not right for Mae, and my wife and Son both well into adulthood should not need my prompting to address the responsibility they obligated themselves to.

Just when I thought I was almost over this crud, a little stuffiness in one nostril, it exploded over night, and I was unable to sleep all night.  In addition to both nostrils being fully involved again and the stuff running down my throat making me gag again, it felt like my entire nervous system was on fire, touch hurt, any touch.  I really want this stuff to go away.  I think there is probably some bacterial component at this point but haven’t any health coverage of funds for a doctor.  Trying to get set up with healthcare but the Washington health plan finder is a disaster and people say they’ll call you back and don’t.  Compulsory insurance != universal healthcare.

Carl and Mae (what do you mean I’m not a lap dog?)

Mae on my knee

Mae under my work table

Mae with remainder of her rope toy

Ephesians 2:8-9 English Standard Version (ESV)

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

I have always had a substantial interest in my dreams because past experiences have taught me they are far more than what most researchers know.

For example, when I was younger, I used to frequently have lucid dreams, and once I became lucid in a dream I could go anywhere I wanted just by thinking about it.  I wanted to understand if I could get real information about places I went to so I devised an experiment.  The experiment was simple, I would go somewhere I hadn’t been but that was close enough to drive to, make a mental note of the surroundings and write it down upon wakening, then drive there and see if it matched what I saw, and it did.

Many of the things you see on Eskimo North today I first saw in dreams in the early days of my BBS.  Back when my computer was a Trs-80 model III, a little 2 Mhz box with 48k of RAM, a screen that was black-and-white with a total of 16 lines of text, 64 characters wide, and block graphics that had a resolution of 128 x 192, each block could be on or off and actually it wasn’t real graphics, it just characters that divided the cell up into a 2×3 grid with an ASCII value mapped to each possible combination.  Well, it wasn’t actually ASCII but it was ASCII values with the high bit turned on.

While I had this simple machine with text-only applications, e-mail, messages, and some text games, I kept having dreams where machines were networked together and you could talk all over the globe, and where there was full motion high resolution colour video and audio and people interacted across great distances this way, and people of common interest found each other this way, and it was these dreams where I saw the potential for this technology that drove me to create what I saw.

So the first thing I do when I wake up is try to remember my dreams and if they aren’t completely trivial, record them.

I watched a program on Nova about dreams, how there are actually two types of dreams, those that occur during REM sleep (it used to be we thought we only dreamed during REM sleep), and those that occur during non-REM sleep.  And it seemed that one type seemed to involve memory consolidation and the other projection into the future.  There was no mention of the type of lucid dream I described earlier which I think are the most interesting of all.

They also said that people tended to dream more when they are depressed, not my personal experience, I seem to have about the same regardless of my mental state though there are nights when every time I wake up it is out of an intense dream, and there are others where I have no memories of dreams at all, last night was one of the latter.  Sometimes I find the converse to be true, it’s easier to be in a good mood when I see some clear path for moving forward, more difficult when I don’t, and dreams tend to help with that.

On Facebook there is a Fox story regarding the suspension of Brian Williams for six months because he’s telling a story about Iraq in a way in which NBC doesn’t approve.  I tried to comment on this three times, and each time my comment disappeared so I thought I’d bring it up somewhere that Fox doesn’t have control over.

Fox News Story regarding Brian Williams

I just assumed this was Fox because it was a fox story.  It seemed so like them, but this is NBC.  What is the world coming to.

My cold has reached a point where it seems to change over several hours.  There will be times now when I can actually breath through both nostrils, speak without snot gurgle, and generally feel well, and times when my right side plugs up bad, generates mass quantities of mucous which then runs down and irritates my throat and screws up my voice.  This seems to change over about a three hour period.  At least mostly I’ve been able to sleep.

Initially I was on a sandy beach with a geography similar to Golden Gardens only much more expansive and sandy with sand going partially up the hill to the West.

Then up on the hill to the West as the sand faded into normal soil there was a big Chinese housing development that wasn’t finished on the Northern portion.  Oddly, this development included some liquid fuel piping infrastructure such that something like gasoline could be distributed to each unit’s parking space.  The Northern portion had this piping already in place but did not have the housing units completed.  This made it an ideal place from which to steal fuel, something not lost on the Russian Gangs.  These guys were into stealing it in massive quantities to sell and make money.  They were also into preserving their enterprise by eliminating anyone who might happen to find out what they were up to, which I did.

I had some kind of personal helicopter device, it was a device you strap on and it had enough fan power to lift an individual very high, way above the clouds. It had enough thrust that it could lift three people, (me and two hanging on) several hundred feet.  It was a green hybrid helicopter device, it ran off of gasoline but it had a battery pack that would keep it going for several minutes after the small plastic gasoline tank that held maybe a quarter, ran out, so that you could come down gently instead of suddenly plummeting to the ground.

To the South of the beach and Chinese housing development was an urban area of mixed hi-rise housing and commercial buildings in a state of semi-decay.  Some buildings were occupied, some were not.  Some buildings and lots were under construction.  Other lots and buildings were in a state of decay, unoccupied, windows and sometimes parts of walls broken out.

I was in the North-Westerly most portion of the Chinese housing development when I came across a young woman, maybe in her early 20’s, thin, long dark hair, perhaps of Italian descent, who was obviously distressed in an otherwise mostly unoccupied portion of the complex.  Seems that we shared a common problem, both of us had observed the Russian Gang stealing fuel, and they had observed us observing them and had a desire to put us out of our misery.

I used my personal helicopter device to lift us both out of there and set us down in the urban area to the North.  It was there I met her male partner, a young man, also thin and dark but with short hair, wearing a black long trench coat.  We collectively decided to go on a escapade of thrill trespassing using my personal helicopter device.  The initial plan was to set down on the rooftops of some of these semi-occupied buildings however we didn’t have enough lift to haul three people to the top, instead settled for landing on a balcony about 27 stories up.  We weren’t sure if that floor was occupied or not.  We came to kind of a dead end with no external view.  Fortunately, my personal helicopter device came equipped with a drilling device that would drill about a six inch hole through just about anything.  We drilled through walls and found one that was external.  Then we drilled a bunch of holes and kicked out the remaining wall and used it to launch from and go back to a place on the ground.

Once on the ground, I found a place that sold batteries for my personal helicopter device that would extend the electric only operation to about fifteen minutes.  This was great as it would just about double my total flight time.  I woke up out of the dream at this point.