Out of breath today. Not sure why. Upper back, shoulders, and neck are stiff and sore but don’t know if that’s why I’m breathless or because of the breathlessness.
Dreamed tonight of suffocating. In the dream, I was ill or suffering from some kind of disability that prevented me from communicating properly and was leaning against the bent knee of a father figure. Something made it difficult to breathe and as I struggled, he held me tighter, thinking I was just distressed over something and not realizing that I was trying to shift to a position where I could breathe better. As he held onto me, his knee pressed into my left upper back, right about where my PE was. He was killing me by trying to help me. And, like those old dreams I used to have where I was cattle prodded, I wasn’t able to breathe or move to defend myself. Eventually the dream me would reach a distress level that snapped me into a slightly different version of the dream—this happened a couple of times; the last time I woke up. It’s not the first time I’ve had a dream like that recently, though I haven’t had those suffocating dreams for years. When I was having the cattle prod dreams regularly, I wrote in to a column in the local paper that did dream analysis. My letter was chosen and the woman said that my subconscious was trying to tell me that I was going down a road that I shouldn’t be. At the time, I told my subconscious that, if it wanted to tell me something, it should be more clear and I had a number of very clear, very amazing dreams after that…and no more cattle prods. But that was in the early 1990s. I don’t know what’s going on now? Is it my subconscious prodding me again? Is it my brain just processing daily events (including my breathing trouble and aches)? Is it prescience, a portent of something? I don’t know but suffocating is not a fun way to spend your REM sleep.
Life Begins at 41...or maybe 43 