Sylvia's Journal

As soon as I wake up I put pillows in my back, one on my lap to serve as a computer desk and start writing. The computer is on standby on my nightstand. Usually I start with my journal but this morning I wanted to make sure I wrote down whatever I remembered from my dreams before they would go poof. From the dreams I remember only incomplete scenes; at least they appear incomplete in my wakeful state but I recognize the themes instantly: something about a fire, about going the wrong direction and about a strong woman. But there are also elements I don’t recognize and don’t know what to do with (blackness, ice, and dead bees). As words they evoke images of dread and doom but the feelings that accompanied them in my dreams had no such negative load and so the obvious interpretation is more complicated than that. I store them for now in my dream journal; maybe the images will be helpful one day in the future, or to feed a nascent poem. I may take them to my next EMDR session.

I have tried to record whatever I remember from my dreams for about 30 years now and some have become very clear from the distance of years while others stayed opaque and a few turned out to be predictive. It is amazing how much work gets done during the night by our minds. It is as if mine never shuts off. During the day the limbs and extremities are busy, but the night is exercise time for the mind.

An extraordinary feature of our existence the last 10 weeks is that we could not take anything for granted anymore and our senses were sharpened, even as pain and nerve problems dulled some parts of our bodies. There was no boredom ever; living as a survivor of a plane crash makes everything new. This must explain the vivid dreams and the activity of my brain at night; while I sleep my mind is like the road crews in the big city at night, digging up broken pipes, repaving roads, moving snow or garbage, fixing stuff they cannot get to during the day because of all the traffic. At night my mind is like that, reliving experiences, relaying neural tracks, reconnecting images or feelings dredged up from the far recesses of my life’s archives and bringing multiple paths together to form brand new round-abouts. Ruth and I are spending much time at these new round-abouts during our weekly sessions. And we are marveling at all the traffic there.

Yesterday was a full day for both of us. Axel went to his physical terrorist in the morning driven there by the guys from next door who have started to organize their shopping trips around Axel’s OT sessions. They have become weekly outings and they seem to have a great time together, helping Axel forget his pain on the way back.

I put in about a third of a workday reviewing and sharpening the draft of a publication spearheaded by my colleague Lourdes who lives in Mexico. We talked on the phone and I have a (self-imposed) deliverable for Friday: a next draft of the 23 page paper on coaching. I sit at my computer writing with my right leg on a pile of pillows on a table. I have to be careful not to twist the rest of my body because that would create more work for the physical therapist who is already spending much time on teaching various muscles, tendons and ligaments to act normal again.

Axel and I had our very first really good fight yesterday, with sound effects, and storming out of room action (which is much more dramatic when the storming is of the slow hobbling kind and you can slam only one fist down on the counter instead of two). Sita watched us but, wise child that she is, did not say a word. We made up in about 15 minutes and things calmed down enough to pick up our exercises again.

Sita took me to PT and when she came to get me one hour later she had a plan. We picked Jim up who needed a break from some very challenging work that involves Excel spreadsheets (Liz Lewis may expect a call soon) and took us to the mall, where she treated herself to a big new screen for her computer to facilitate a new assignment that requires a gigantic illustration. I took advantage of the opportunity and stocked up on chocolate.

We ate half of the duck, finished the lasagna and will be working on the remaining lobsters and duck today. We may even get to some of our frozen dinners tonight, rediscovering things in the refrigerator we had forgotten about. We are doing well: eating well, sleeping well and getting better.