sleepless at home November 2012

sleepless at home November 2012

In November of 2012, I just knew I was feeling strange.  I could not sleep after November 10.  It was an odd reality for someone who spent previous years lethargic and sleeping at least 9 hours a day and needing a nap.  So, I sat in my bedroom with a restless, strange mind.  I thought meditation could calm my mind and rest my body.  I did not understand not sleeping and what it would become.  From restlessness, my mind turned to overly active and playful:  delirium?  My imagination took over where dreams would exist.  Unfortunately, an active imagination cannot change the reality of memory. 

We have all heard of "your life flashes before you eyes," but how we view this has been informed by loads of television programs and movies.  My mind did the time-warp, and it was an odd and fascinating experience which I hope will never be repeated.  I fell back through my timeline with every memory unlocked moving towards my birth.  Everything was super-realistic, as I sat on the bedroom floor where I had crumpled from exhausting myself in a hyper-dance.  Just as quickly as I fell back, I then fell forward with a rush to my head:  vvroop.  I was back in the present mind, confused and strange.  I tried calling this period near the end of November 2012 my "near enlightenment," partly because my mind and body were running and working faster than ever linking words and topics and data stored . . . Others call it my nervous breakdown.  I don't know.  I wish I could still access those notes from Biology, Trigonometry, European History, or English Literature where I scrawled in the margins. Between the energetic awakening, there were lulls where I felt lost in my bedroom suite.  I misplaced a brush, a piece of chocolate; time was incongruent.  This disturbed me immensely.

Missing time.  Missing mind.  Missing things.  Missing thoughts.

I try to write to a topic because there were so many layers to this experience, most of which were unusual for me.  I could note them.  I could put them into memory, but I could not figure out what had gone wrong with me or what had gone wrong with the world.

. . . . to have a pensieve like Professor Dumbledore

Recollections of a Worse Time

She's a lunatic in her parents asylum.

Stolen away from this home in a violent way

I come to find out yesterday there was never a hope of a medical condition.  My parents took the only route they could see through a system that solely deals with mental illness.  I lingered in prison unnecessarily.  I lingered waiting for a proper medical evaluation.

My behavior, as strange as it was, was all based upon the instincts of survival mixed with a little confusion over the sensory impute I was receiving.  Try to play god to a child acting out of the ordinary.  It is a lot easier than you could ever believe.

"Bitter much?"  I ask myself often.  "Why not, " is often my response.

I have a history of treatment for balancing hormones without ever a diagnosis.  But, now I have the preexisting conditions of mental illness, a banner perhaps you could hold high, if you only knew in some places it gives people carte blanche to treat you as inhuman.  The drugs they gave me did not help; they made my pee smell of cream-of-wheat.  

Room 618 is where you linger with the amplified sound of the HVAC return retrofitted into the bedroom.  Pink noise and noise of a co-ed dormitory with men loitering outside of the room.  Exposed asbestos tile near the new motion activated sink. 

Nothing but a flimsy shower curtain for the old toilet-shower room.  The shower has been defunct for years with a rusted shower head and some previous inmate's litmus test strips littering the shower pan.  The original matching blue toilet was replaced with a contemporary "comfort height" toilet which really is handicapping for a woman my size, under 5 foot tall.

The toilet never flushes correctly, though it makes a great attempt at it, not completely overflowing at every attempt at flushing.  The water from the sink tastes of blood - too much iron.  The main stack must be old cast iron and rusted innward.  An expensive repair, I know, I've learned lots watching people flip houses on tv.  I wish I could focus properly on a television in this place and escape in my mind, but what does it matter they have an awful, old television down the hall.

My body feels sea-sick.  I am in a haze.  

"Meditation Time" I read on the schedule posted outside the nurses station.  Oh, I realize too late I'm the only yogini in the place.

"Medication Time," well, a mistake you can smile at today.

This was meant to be an "Health Center."

Posting from February 1, 2013 - My Timeline: Purgatory 1, Summerhill, Dublin, and Trainspotting Character in Edinburgh

The first level of Purgatory was somewhat akin to being trapped in Das Boot.  The sound of metal creaking in the bowels of a submarine.  Metal gates echoing for what seems like eternity.  Steel everywhere, no color, no sunlight to speak of, and a bed made out of rough blankets which would fit right in the barracks on either side in World War II.
I thought of the joyous scene when they are drinking and feasting and break into "It's a long long way to Tipperary and Tipperary is our home . . . "

So, let's all travel back through my timeline to when I was a very, very young 20 year old living in Dublin, Ireland.

ASDA Bus Station, Bournemouth, England, Age 20

It was the darkest and most depressing winter of my life.  I worked off Grafton Street with lots of young people from places other than Ireland.  We had to dress in turn of the last century (1900) servant uniforms.

I had a pleasant conversation one morning with a man who used to tour with T. Rex about songs about Deborahs.

The Bedroom I Let, Summer St. North, Dublin

I lived in Summerhill in North Dublin adjacent to the Council Estates.  I would walk to work in the dark down O'Connell Street with a solo garda on the beat.
At work, there wasn't a window letting in the misty grey daylight, and by the time my shift was done, there was absolutely no light.  To get to the women's locker room, I would go through a door from the bakeshop near the entrance and go down stairs then upstairs like I was inside a German Expressionist movie.

I once cleared Thom Yorke's breakfast plate and watched him read and drink his tea in my empty section.  All of the Irish girls acted like I was special, but we all know I was just a freak. 
I would go sit in Saint Stephen's Green somedays to enjoy the only green I could really find in the dreary city center.  One day, I was sitting on a rock reading a newspaper, and I was approached by a cute, Irish guy.  He asked me if I wanted some drugs.  I laughed and wasn't sure he was serious.  I mean as a child of the '80s, Nancy Reagan had prepared me for this precise moment:  "I'm just saying 'No' to drugs.  That means, 'No, thank you.'" 

Broken Window Pane

The children in Summerhill didn't know how to play.  They would just fight and make each other scream.  One day, they threw a rock through my bedroom window.  I had to sleep in all of the clothes I owned that night; the landlord couldn't fix the window until the next day.  The Frenchmen with Polish last names who I lived with convinced me to report the crime to the Garda station because I spoke the best English.

Now, let's go ahead and take a commuter flight to beautiful Scotland.  I hadn't seen sunshine all winter, but when the plane approached Edinboro golden sun glistened through the clouds.

Edinburgh Castle, Scotland

I called my friend from a telephone booth right in the shadow of the castle (too expensive for me to tour).  And, what do you know a character right out of Trainspotting starts yelling at me to get off of the phone.  So, holding the phone in my hand, I turn to face him and I yell and scream back at him:  I'm paying to use the telephone and he can wait his turn or go run around the corner to another payphone.  He's Scottish; he should know where the hell to find another phone in his own country.

Squirrel, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh

Edingburgh in the mid 1990s

Posting from January 8, 2013 - Chapter 1: thinking in old fashioned hypertext

This story begins the night of my cousin Elizabeth's wedding, the second week of November 2012.  The wedding was outside of Hammond, Louisiana.  I did not sleep that night.  I could not remember sleeping a full night's sleep from Saturday, November 10 through about December 10 or 15.  I can't remember the first night I actually slept more than 3 hours straight.  

The night after November 10 (the 11th, I believe) I remember my mind and heart racing.  I remember dancing the dances from the Buffy episode "Once More with Feeling," which was the musical put together by Adam Shankman.  I was in my bedroom probably wearing some just below the knee length leggings.  I dance both the parts of Buffy and her younger sister Dawn.  I danced and danced.  Adam Shankman is also a judge on my favorite summer television show So You Think You Can Dance.  So, I went into a Bollywood style dance, as well.

I was having the best time of my life playing in my bedroom.

Then, I thought why is my mind working so quickly?  Why am I linking all of these memories and facts that are stored in my mind?  I am thinking in old fashioned hypertext.  Why are all of these memories of my life coming to the forefront of my mind?  Why am I thinking about experiences of my past with such great clarity?

Is this enlightenment?  I had been meditating instead of sleeping the night before (the 11th or the 12th?).

Then, I thought about one of my favorite television shows Doctor Who.  It is a science-fiction show in which the Doctor travels through time and space trying never to double back on his own timeline.

There was an episode in which a daughter is made from his DNA sample, and she skips childhood.  She dies at the end instead of regenerating - as far as he knows.  But, the show ends with her being brought back to life after The Doctor has already left and moved on to his next destination.

So, I was thinking am I a daughter lost in time and space?

Perhaps.

In the show Doctor's Daughter named Jenny does gymnastics through a laser beam grid.

I began doing what any yogini would do.  I began practicing my inversions:  handstands and armbalancing and headstands, too.  These came with greater ease than they had ever come before.

This was one of the best experiences of my life.

However, I was really hungry and thirsty, too.

All of the food and water began tasting strangely.  I felt like it was poisoned.  Some tasted, perhaps, like rat poison (no, I've never tasted that before).  Some tasted like iodine or formaldehyde.  I kept searching for water and food that tasted correctly - like how I remember.  It was very confusing.  And, I panicked at this point.

Finally, I found some dark chocolate and that was my safe food along with sardines.  I dumped the sardines in a bowl for me and a bowl for Orlan and did my best to keep us hydrated.

I worried that the cats were dying.  I worried that I was dying.

My heart was racing and beating arhythmically.    

I tried listening to my CDs and none of them sounded correctly.  They seemed all garbled and tortured and ruined.  The lyrics were changed.

Was this a living nightmare?  A day-mare? This is what it seemed to me.

One point in time I was a fabulous yogini.  The next point in time I was in a panic to save myself and all of the cats in the house.

Dad laid in his recliner with his cat Flash; she keeping watch over him.

Mom was speaking like a frightened girl who had just lost her father to cancer -- not allowed to visit him in the hospital and say her goodbyes.

What really happened?  Perhaps my story is the truth.  It is after all my story.

The food problem freaked me out the most.  My safe foods kept becoming unsafe, tasting differently.

I'll end this posting here.  There are a lot more details and things I remember.  I'm just taking my time writing them down.  The chronology probably will never be perfect.

©2013 D. Moss