Guess who had a lucid dream?! Well, not me, but my father did! Since he’s a very nice father, he has lately been reading a lot about this subject on a certain website, despite it probably being not of much inherent interest.
He sent me a wonderful description of what sounded like a very vivid and detailed dream, wherein so many impossible things happened that it finally became obvious that he was dreaming. I also have a new lucid dream correspondent (a really, really good one), and am greatly enjoying sharing thoughts about this most fascinating of subjects.
I had to have a little spot of surgery today. My doctor, who gets rave reviews on Yelp, said that since I’ve had this surgery (twice) before, she didn’t think I needed to go to the hospital for a pre-surgery appointment, but I did end up having to do that. I found this out when I got a message on my answering machine saying they’d scheduled me a 7:30 appointment, and that I should arrive at 7:00 (meaning 7:00 in the morning, for a person who can barely get to work by 9:00).
That meant getting up at 4:20 a.m., due to my extensive morning routine, and that was skipping more than half of the things I usually do. I still got seven and a half hours sleep, but I felt unbelievably terrible, anyway; I think my eyes just having to see the digits “4:20,” glowing red in the dark was too much.
I’d thought of taking a cab to the hospital, but decided riding my bike across town would be more invigorating, and it was. I rode to the hospital, then to work, then to see my doctor toward the end of the workday, and then to Walgreens to fill a prescription for one measly little pill, and then home.
Despite feeling haggard, all that bike riding made me very cheerful. I also like to be extremely upbeat around anyone who is going to be near me with a knife while I’m unconscious. I don’t think my doctor would make a superfluous hole in me for complaining about having to go to Walgreens, but why be reckless?
Yesterday evening I thought I might try to find some references in my journal to one of my restored-by-Facebook friends; I thought he might get a kick out of reading what I had to say about him 30 years ago, but I had to give up on this project. I found a couple of mentions, including one extremely flattering one, and there may be more, but in that era, I either typed my journal—single spaced: what was wrong with me?—on whatever piece of paper came my way, such as on the back of a piece of scrap paper, or I wrote it in a spiral notebook, page after page of relentless cursive, what now looks like block after solid block of scribbling (using both sides of the paper, of course).
Further, it appears I didn’t believe in paragraphs yet—I would have thought I was born believing in paragraphs—and I also insisted on doing much of the handwriting with my left hand: In the event that I should suffer a stroke—I was 16 and had not a moment to lose when it came to stroke preparedness—I wanted to be able to write with my remaining hand.
Which is to say there is much, much data, but not much information. It would probably take me as long to reread all that stuff as it did to live it in the first place. (And what a bacchanal it was; my goodness. A couple of weeks of that would probably finish me off if I tried it now.)
So, anyway, I was due at the hospital for surgery at 6:00 a.m. (“odarkhundred,” as a friend said), which meant getting up at 3:20 a.m. the very day after I’d gotten up at 4:20 a.m. This time I took a cab.
I put on a gown and lay in bed and read an interesting article about nightmares in a recent New Yorker, and started on a very funny piece about an Egyptian Egyptologist with a pugnacious style of relating and TV-friendly architectural methods that worry some of his academic peers.
Then the anesthesiologist came in and said something very exciting: “I guess we’ll be taking out some organs today!”
“No,” I said. “No. We are not taking out any organs. Do not take out any organs.”
My doctor came in just then and confirmed no organs would be removed—something had been written down wrong somewhere—and she said my hair looked great. I told you she was a good doctor.
Then another lady said, “Don’t forget your party hat,” and put on my hair net for me and off we rolled, and then I was looking up at Dr. M. in the operating room, and she probably patted my arm, and then I was awake again, in the recovery room, groaning with every out-breath—I wasn’t in pain in the slightest; it was some involuntary thing—and then this that and the other, and I was transported home. Oh, Dr. M. showed me photographs of what she’d done to my internal self. It looked very nice (from an artistic standpoint).
I was home by 11:30 a.m. and felt perfectly, absolutely well. “Good to see you in such fine fettle!” exclaimed Lisa M. when she came to visit later; we had a delightful chat. Hammett ran into the bathroom when she came in and stayed behind the sink until she left.
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