Lately almost every night I’ve been having incredibly odd dreams, that whirl from topic to topic seemingly without purpose or plotline. Characters morph into each other, settings melt and flow back and forth while I’m standing in them — it makes no sense. Weird dreams have been absent from my life for so many months that I had almost forgotten they used to be a regular occurrence. I can time their return with the arrival of two new chemicals in my Psychotropic makeup: the usage of a new generic brand of Depakote and the return of alcohol to my weekend routine.
I first noticed my Depakote had changed a couple of months ago. Instead of large, dark grey pills, they were now large, solid white pills. So I know they’re different somehow. The manufacturer on the label is different, too. But I don’t really think they’re the cause. After all, I’ve been on Depakote before and it didn’t seem to coincide with especially weird dreaming. No, I think the most likely cause is alcohol withdrawal.
Vlad once told me that his alcohol withdrawal dreams were as vivid and strange as any horror novel. Something about the alcohol rushing from your central nervous system wreaks havoc with the Subconscious mind, he said. At the same time, you’re not supposed to be a very active dreamer when you go to bed drunk, according to what Delbert told me. And best I can recall, my stranger dreams did seem to occur a day or two after I had quit drinking for the week. So I guess that’s it. All my readers will have some vivid dream journals to look forward to!
The first one I have to relate today wasn’t much of a dream, it was more like a brief episode of “sleep paralysis.” Sleep paralysis is a condition in which you are semi-awake but unable to move, and you have intense dreams that are so vivid they seem like they’re real. You can read more about the condition with a little judicious use of Google, if you’ve never had it happen to you. It’s very scary. Anyway, I had just turned in for the night after reading a chapter of Stephen King’s “It,” a particularly horrific one where the Losers’ Club confronts the titular creature for the first time with the goal of attacking it. I dreamed that I was lying on a couch in Granny Mabels’s house and Uncle was hovering over me, saying “These instances of Demonic Possession are very persistent and difficult to exorcise.” In the dream, and simultaneously in my real-life bed, I was twitching and lurching as I rebuked a Demonic Force that was taking over my body… or at least that’s what it felt like. As I called upon the name of Our Savior, I felt a great sense of relief as the Evil Force fled and normalcy returned to my body and my limbs. What really happened was, I woke up.
The next dream is really a sequence of dreams, where I discovered that my father was not my biological ancestor — and my actual father was “World Wide Wes,” the “power behind the throne” of John Calipari’s basketball dynasty. I traveled to some kind of kingdom of candy like in “Adventure Time” except the “Jolly Ranchers” of this world were revolting against the Queen, and it was my job to put them down. Something about a GameBoy Advance, something about the Jolly Ranchers springing a trap on me where I was to be encased in a cage of peanuts. Apparently our intelligence division had tricked them into thinking I was allergic to peanuts. I merely burst from the cage, laughing, and began to capture the Jolly Ranchers. For some reason, I had turned into the Matt Smith version of Doctor Who. I don’t remember much else from this dream, aside from the fact that we subdued the Ranchers and peace returned to the Kingdom.