Tag: brain

Where am I and why is this lion sniffing me?

I just read a good post by genericus about dreams which got me thinking.

I don’t often remember my dreams now. I think this is probably a result of sleeping better, since as I understand it you remember the dreams if you wake up afterwards for a bit, and they tend to fade otherwise. In general, though, my dream life has been unremarkable and kind of boring. Mostly I just get the same three or four classic anxiety dreams about school or travel or money problems. They’re annoying but not nightmares.

When I was a young child I had very unpleasant nightmares. Many of these were fever dreams during some childhood “stomach flu” fever. Almost all of them had the odd feature of being wordless and in fact free of story or reason. I would just be seized with terrible fear and anxiety. Sometimes it took forever for my parents to get me out of this state. I couldn’t go back to sleep, and an oppressive horror of everything seized me. One frequent hallucination in this situation was that I was responsible for holding the entire universe in my hand, and it was at once somehow tiny and very heavy. Almost always, though, it was just the Nameless Dread. For a few hours at a time. Boy did that freak out my parents!

I had one very good, very detailed, and very strange dream in high school. I was an apostle, one of those who had met Christ. And I was preaching the Gospel to sailors on a classic 19th century style wooden warship, like something out of a Hornblower novel. There were all these sailors sitting listening to me explain that it was all true, and I had met the guy, and wasn’t this great news. I was apparently impressive. I woke up understanding religion better than I ever had.

The only other notable dream I can remember was more recently and very depressing. Everyone was disgusted and angry with me, including close friends and immediate family. I was openly abused and reviled, and unfortunately it was all true. That one took a few weeks to shake.

Otherwise? I sleep, I wake up. I am not bothered by dreams for good or ill now. I snorkel in the Styx for 8 hours a night and wake up refreshed. Not such a bad deal, although I’d prefer hot ‘n’ steamy sex dreams or entertaining art slideshows if I could order from a menu.

Have a safe dysfunctional obligation activity

This year I am once again grateful for my family’s behavior at holiday times. I grew up agnostic, so there was never any religious pressure. Christmas was a gift exchange and a couple of nice meals, and it still is. The most frequent verb I see this week is “survive”, as in “surviving the holidays” or “survived my family again”. There’s tremendous stress about food, gifts, the presence of difficult relatives, and every kind of parent/child conflict. People don’t eat the food their parents eat any more, or the gifts are too much or not enough money, or the gifts have been a form of warfare for 20 years, or Uncle Ted is a racist, or Dad always asks the boyfriend if he’s going to be anybody ever, or or or.

And more seriously some people I know go into a major PTSD mode during the “holidays” because their childhoods were so gothically horrible that memories of family togetherness are a symptom rather than a pleasant reverie.

It’s a big joke in our culture that holidays are a stressful mess and that everyone is miserable and drunk, etc. “Surviving the holidays” in every way is the goal. It’s linked in my mind with the “Safe” thing, e.g. “Have a safe holiday!”. It’s sort of assumed that you’ll hate the whole thing, drink like a fish and pop pills, and die in a 7-car pileup on some snowy turnpike, thereby causing what the newspapers inaccurately call a “tragedy”.

My family’s troubles are constant, ongoing, and subtle. We don’t have screaming matches or drunken rampages, no one hits anyone, and we don’t say nuclear weapon phrases like “I don’t love you”. We may undermine for years at a time, or be unreasonably irritable, or fail to connect in some dispiriting way. There are conflicts and painful situations that aren’t allowed to be mentioned or discussed.

But we don’t have “holiday” stress. Despite all my complaints about my psyche and my issues, I’m very grateful for my family 99% of the time. My heart goes out to everyone who has to Survive instead of relaxing around now.

Amazon, where you’re only a few clicks from WHAT

From looking at books on neurofeedback, and being a bit squicked by someone’s healthfoodstorenutcase list including the phrase “Neurofeedback + light/sound device = Infinite Synergy!! Out of this world !!! The proteus also goes up to 50hz”, I clicked on a list that was linked, but was actually just about fucked-up Twin Peaks type stuff, and then linked from that was, uh

JUGGALO LIST?

Six degrees of dumbass, everywhere. AMERICA FUCK YEAH!

who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

Even when I’m in a good mood (I have been since last brain lady appointment, as she predicted), it’s impossible to imagine my situation improving. I know from various experts that this is a symptom and consequence of my weird PTSD-like situation, but it’s still a huge barrier.

It’s as though if I could just draw a line or two from here to some place I’d actually want to be, and believe that I could get there for real, it’d be so much easier dealing with the day to day.

It’s a strange situation to know reasonably and intellectually that at least some of my beliefs about myself and the world are untrue, unreasonable, even a little insane, and still not be able to dislodge myself from them. I could write a ten page third-person analysis that would be completely accurate and still read it to myself and say to myself “you don’t understand”.

And it’s even stranger to see myself doing or not doing things that I can’t stand, or that seem alien to my personality. I’m the slob who hates a mess, for example. And I’m the outgoing, socially successful person who likes women and wants to be close to one, and I never have. There are a host of other minor things like that that leave me thinking “who the hell put the brain slug in when I wasn’t looking?” The technical term for this is “ego dystonia”. Brain lady says it’s consistent with my injuries.

I’m no longer a Christian, but I still have a lot in common with poor old grumpy self-deprecating Paul. There’s no better statement of ego dystonia than Romans 7:14:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

The French word for “pudding” is apparently “pudding”

I had a really great dinner with salome_st_john tonight. Mmm, Pescadou. Great food, great wine, great conversation. It’s interesting how someone with whom I have so much in common has had a totally different life.

Also, I had a hell of a steak au poivre. God damn.

Brain lady was productive today. I was drifting into a very unpleasant mental state in which everything distracted and irritated me. If I was working on something and someone asked me a question, it was hard not to snap. My thinking was clouded, too; it was hard to find words. And decisions were nearly impossible. I got the technical rundown on which squishy brain parts were responsible for this. It wasn’t the multitasking function this time, which was interesting. So then beep boop neurofeedback on different sites this time. I left much calmer.

Saw Michelle & Joy at D’s. Hadn’t seen Joy in forever. Her father has died and the family is going through the expected horrors. I managed not to propose marriage to Michelle again; I’m quite proud of myself. Later had a convo with Chris-with-the-old-laptop about crazy health food store types and the belief in essences, “natural” medicine, and huge doses of everything.

There is now a cat leaning on my leg.

Tonight I smoked for the first time in at least a year. It was nice. It tasted like my first cigar.

Good night to Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, I guess.

What’s all this about a clam? Oh no…

After today’s phrenology session I had an interesting talk with Brain Lady. I found myself explaining to her why she sounded like a postscientific wacko at first, before I learned more about her. Most of the problem is her language. She speaks Science and has been working at very technical jobs in the mental health field for 20 years, but when she’s explaining things to a client she uses analogies and metaphors that have been totally ruined by New Age bubbleheads.

For example, she will say “I’m doing this site to push the energy back over to the other side of your brain”. On further questioning, she explains that this is a thumbnail description for a poorly understood phenomenon in which treating one site causes the voltages to go down there and up in another part of the brain. She doesn’t literally believe that she is pushing the energy around. She refers to treating multiple injuries as “like peeling off layers of an onion”. This sounds like she believes in concentric spheres of some intangible substance, but again it’s a simile. Her observations show her that multiple injuries often require multiple stages of treatment, but there isn’t any proven one-to-one correspondence between the injuries and the stages of treatment. And when she’s talking about electrical activity and mental acuity increasing after treatment, she calls it “waking up the brain”; another analogy. All of these things sound like something the local Crystal Anus Delver at the Metaphysical Bookhonk would say. In Brain Lady’s case, she’s working off many years of academic study and clinical experience in developmental disability, head injuries, special education, substance abuse treatment, and psychotherapy.

The other bad news I had for her is that her stuff sounds like Scientology. Wires on your head, healing old injuries, increased states of awareness, oh dear. You’re expecting Tom Cruise to appear stage left and congratulate you for choosing the right path. Here’s the hilarious part: she knows nothing about Scientology. As I was explaining how many parallels there are, her eyes got wider and wider. “Oh no, do people think this is like Scientology? That’s just a dumb cult!” Poor thing, she’s spent 20 years in the Science Hole and working with actual patients, and hasn’t noticed some weird cultural trends.

She pointed out that she doesn’t speak in Science much to clients because communicating the statistical links between voltage differentials and affective disorders to people with head injuries can be frustrating to both parties. I think I did manage to get across that she was using language and analogies that had been poisoned, though.

For my own part, I told her I had only really started trusting her judgment the day she went off on a rant about attribution errors and the importance of knowing your independent variables and not trusting your subjective observations, with several anecdotes of failed studies that hadn’t taken these precautions.

off to the phrenologist

Despite a couple of nasty troughs, it was still relatively good brain weather since Wednesday. My LJ despair fits are accurate about certain parts of the cycle. And the situation is pretty bad on a few levels. But at least the last week or so has been about 80% unhappily stable and only 20% Pray For Death. I can do that ratio for a few months for a big enough payoff.

I am concerned about alienating people, though. Raw despair isn’t exactly “selling yourself”, nor is flailing anger. It’s what I’ve got, and it’s true, and I can’t really avoid communicating it. That’s not who I am, though. It’s who I’m crawling out of, with whatever strength I can dig up.

No doubt part of my sense that I’m losing friends is due to an understandable flinch away from someone who’s having a hard time and not hiding it.

Good thing the cat doesn’t care, eh?