When you're strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you're strange
No one remembers your name
When you're strange
When you're strange
When you're strange
"People Are Strange" - The Doors
Benders tend to reveal some truths that are a bit strange when reviewing them in the bright light of the stark, sober morning the following day. The mind is quite strange. Especially under the influence of mind-altering drugs like alcohol.
I woke up minutes ago after experiencing my equivalent of a nightmare. Was it about the boogyman or vampires or other such creatures that go bump in the night? Was it more realistic fears like something violent, being in peril, or just dying? No I don't really have those dreams.
I was simply losing my mind.
In the dream, which was really just a snippet of a dream since there was no plot or other characters, it was just me and even in real time it mustn't have been more than a few seconds long. I "woke up" in my dream only to find out that several boxes and items from my closets in my house were piled by the front door. Perplexed, but assuming I'd been drinking and blacked out when I did this since no one else was around to have done it, I begrudgingly just took the time to put every item back in its place. No sooner had I finished cleaning up, I again "woke up" to find the stuff all back in front of the door. Again. Not all the same items though. Some from other rooms like the kitchen and bathroom. All placed by the front door. WTF?!
IRL, I actually have woken up to find odd things. Some of these I've written about here in this blog like the time I discovered I'd pissed on my stove top during a drunken blackout in my little converted garage home in New Orleans. Other times I'd discovered a cash register receipt from a totally forgotten beer run; evidence of driving fully loaded to resupply my monkey. But these examples are blackouts and the strange behavior is somewhat excusable due to drinking. In my dream, though I thought I might have been drinking, it's revealed it wasn't a factor. I was blacking out and doing weird things with an unadulterated mind.
At the facility I work, residents are always doing stuff like the shit in my dream. One guy takes little pieces of paper that he's ripped out of magazines and notebooks, puts a dab of feces on each and arranges the smelly torn papers in a pattern on the floor of his room. Another guy writes about the coming four horses of the Apocalypse and the burning of the infidels in his almost-illegible chicken scratch, over and over and over on the worn pages of his numerous spiral notebooks he stores in huge piles around his room. Another has an impeccably furnished apartment which looks absolutely normal except that each night she delicately props a tambourine against the base of her front door so that she'll hear if the Mafia tries to break into her room while she sleeps.
I could go on and on about the bizarre behavior of the mentally ill but I think you get the gist. The scene I dreamed is the cold and mysterious reality for a lot of seriously crazy people.
My subconscious has been dropping pretty obvious warnings to my conscious over the past few years. Sometimes I heed the signs, most times I don't. Stuff like my recent bouts of nausea shortly after I buy beer or wine, way BEFORE I actually start to drink it. The dank and very real depression that sticks with me for days if I take even the tiniest toke of weed. The feelings of awkwardness and depravity I get when I'm buying 12-packs at 7:30 in the morning at the neighborhood Publix as the elderly cashiers and baggers look at me with a mixture of pity and disgust.
And now this dream. A reminder, perhaps, that indeed, like the egg frying in the cast iron skillet, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Faces come out of the rain
When you're strange
No one remembers your name
When you're strange
When you're strange
When you're strange
"People Are Strange" - The Doors
Benders tend to reveal some truths that are a bit strange when reviewing them in the bright light of the stark, sober morning the following day. The mind is quite strange. Especially under the influence of mind-altering drugs like alcohol.
I woke up minutes ago after experiencing my equivalent of a nightmare. Was it about the boogyman or vampires or other such creatures that go bump in the night? Was it more realistic fears like something violent, being in peril, or just dying? No I don't really have those dreams.
I was simply losing my mind.
In the dream, which was really just a snippet of a dream since there was no plot or other characters, it was just me and even in real time it mustn't have been more than a few seconds long. I "woke up" in my dream only to find out that several boxes and items from my closets in my house were piled by the front door. Perplexed, but assuming I'd been drinking and blacked out when I did this since no one else was around to have done it, I begrudgingly just took the time to put every item back in its place. No sooner had I finished cleaning up, I again "woke up" to find the stuff all back in front of the door. Again. Not all the same items though. Some from other rooms like the kitchen and bathroom. All placed by the front door. WTF?!
IRL, I actually have woken up to find odd things. Some of these I've written about here in this blog like the time I discovered I'd pissed on my stove top during a drunken blackout in my little converted garage home in New Orleans. Other times I'd discovered a cash register receipt from a totally forgotten beer run; evidence of driving fully loaded to resupply my monkey. But these examples are blackouts and the strange behavior is somewhat excusable due to drinking. In my dream, though I thought I might have been drinking, it's revealed it wasn't a factor. I was blacking out and doing weird things with an unadulterated mind.
At the facility I work, residents are always doing stuff like the shit in my dream. One guy takes little pieces of paper that he's ripped out of magazines and notebooks, puts a dab of feces on each and arranges the smelly torn papers in a pattern on the floor of his room. Another guy writes about the coming four horses of the Apocalypse and the burning of the infidels in his almost-illegible chicken scratch, over and over and over on the worn pages of his numerous spiral notebooks he stores in huge piles around his room. Another has an impeccably furnished apartment which looks absolutely normal except that each night she delicately props a tambourine against the base of her front door so that she'll hear if the Mafia tries to break into her room while she sleeps.
I could go on and on about the bizarre behavior of the mentally ill but I think you get the gist. The scene I dreamed is the cold and mysterious reality for a lot of seriously crazy people.
My subconscious has been dropping pretty obvious warnings to my conscious over the past few years. Sometimes I heed the signs, most times I don't. Stuff like my recent bouts of nausea shortly after I buy beer or wine, way BEFORE I actually start to drink it. The dank and very real depression that sticks with me for days if I take even the tiniest toke of weed. The feelings of awkwardness and depravity I get when I'm buying 12-packs at 7:30 in the morning at the neighborhood Publix as the elderly cashiers and baggers look at me with a mixture of pity and disgust.
And now this dream. A reminder, perhaps, that indeed, like the egg frying in the cast iron skillet, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.