Lucid Dreams and PTSD

Do you sleep well?  How long?  Do you need to take anything at night?  This photo is pretty much how my dreams looked last night.  Nightmares.  I woke several times to some real horror stories.  

I am always in my dreams.  Do you ever have dreams where you are not present?  That's curious, isn't it?  Do we only dream about ourselves?  

I just Googled it.  The average person has 4 dreams per night.  In most dreams, the dreamer is the protagonist.  There is a very small minority of dreams where the dreamer isn't present.  The dreams I had last night are referred to as "lucid dreams," dreams where you know you are dreaming while you are asleep.  Now here's the kicker.  Lucid dreams are thought to help people who have experienced traumatic experiences--PTSD.  

Curious, that.  

I had two last night.  In one, I ran over a pedestrian.  In the other, an ex-girlfriend was was threatening to take my house.  

I'm not making this up.  

O.K. Let's backtrack a bit.  

I've had two consecutive nights out, first with the across the street neighbor and then with two old friends I haven't seen in years.  One of the two is a longtime friend with whom I have had years of adventure.  We stopped hanging out, though, when I was with Ili.  The conversations we had at dinner opened some old doors.  The one I had the night before with my neighbor opened some new ones that look to the future.

 Last night, I had no engagements, but I wasn't feeling like staying home, so after I visited my mother, I decided to get an absinthe drink and then some dinner.  Three nights of eating out is a real rarity for me now, but I was kind of feeling new again. 

At the absinthe bar, the owner/bartender, the one who recognizes me, was not there.  The music, usually good, old stuff, pre-rocker era had been replaced with loud, bad stuff that was irritating me.  The place had been taken over, it seemed, by the typical shithead downtown crowd.  My bartender was cold as the seat I was sitting in. . . uncomfortably so.  I drank my drink, but that was all--without pleasure or mirth.  

When I departed, I went down the street to the fabulous bbq joint.  Ordered a pulled pork sandwich with black beans and jasmine rice, and a local IPA.  I sat at the bar/chef's table which is a cook's table, really.  A tall, pixie looking girl with strikingly good looks works there.  She could easily be a fashion model.  She had changed her hair color from the last time I was there to something vaguely metallic.  Short cropped bangs.  Tats and a septum ring.  Her friend came in.  It was her birthday.  I heard the two of them talk.  The would-be fashion model is younger than she looks, maybe twelve if their conversation is any indication.  It was painful.  

At the end of the bar, the owner sat.  He is a giant.  Science would say so.  When he saw me, he gave a little smile of recognition and said hello.  

"Hi," I smiled.  

"Where's your girl?" he asked.  

Ili and I used to go there when the place first opened oh so many years ago.  We went there for the last time just before I went to L.A.  We were broken up, but she showed at my door the night before I left.  We rode the Vespa to get bbq.  I asked her if she wanted to come with me to L.A.  I'd already booked everything.  All she would need was a flight.  We looked it up.  It was cheaper than the ticket I bought, same flight.  

She didn't go.  That was the last Vespa ride before the one where I was cracked.  

So his asking kind of opened up an old wound.  

He got up and walked through the kitchen through a door I assumed was an office.  My food came.  There was the clacking of plates, the patter of the servers.  And there was this. 

I'd forgotten how good the original song had been.  It had been transplanted by the Stones cover in my head  (link).  The Stones version is good, but it is not sweet. Of course.  The Temptations were a Berry Gordy product from his early Motown days.  He had chosen and invented those sounds, and by god so many of them were fantastic.  In the '80s, I dated a girl whose father owned part of Motown.  He and Gordy were in business together in other ways, too.  They owned some race horses together, or so my girlfriend reported.  They also owned a number of radio stations across the country.  

The sandwich was good.  My fingers, sticky from the bbq sauce, left prints all over my beer glass.  

When I finished dinner and got back to my car, I asked Siri to play the song again for me.  I hadn't been able to hear so well with the clanging and clacking of the kitchen.  I wanted to hear those strings in the song's opening better.  Chills ran down my arms.  I thought I might break down.  

Was it the absinthe, I wondered?

When I got home, the cat was waiting, talking.  I gave her some food, poured a scotch, lit a cheroot, and joined her.  

Early on when our old, kind of famous band started playing gigs, I think we may have done this song.  I know for sure we played "My Girl."  I sang without knowing all the words.  I kind of scatted some of it or made up parts, but I knew it in the main.  

When I got back into the house, I put it on to play.  The Stones had covered this one, too (link).  Our version sounded more like theirs, of course, a little coarser and harsher.

When that had finished playing, Youtube gave me this one.  

Yea. . . the Stones covered that one, too (link).  So did we.  

But none of it was as sweet and delicious as those Temptations songs.  I decided to send YouTube links of them to myself for later, but, as one will after absinthe, beer, and scotch, I sent them to my old bandmate/college roommate and his wife instead.  

"Having a little party at your house?" she responded.  

"Oops.  Didn't mean to sent those to you."

"Remember the time in college we went to play bball one afternoon and saw the Temptations band doing their sound check instead?" my old roomie wrote.  

"We saw everything," I replied.  

I turned off the music and poured another drink, then sat down to watch "Babylon Berlin."  I'm on season four, the last, and let me tell you, it gets weirder and weirder and weirder.  But it is terribly good.  

When I went to bed, I had a head full of memories and weirdness.  

Lucid dreams and PTSD.  Yea, maybe that makes sense.  I'm going to have to do something to shake it all today.  

It is Friday.  I'm waiting to hear from my mountain friend who is in town to see his parents.  Brought the whole family.  He's been at the beach house this week with his filthy rich sister who married a fellow who basically invented online learning software, so I don't know if I'll hear from him or not, but it could be a 4th night out and I think I'm a Ready Teddy.  A little breakdown might be good for the soul.  

If you haven't had enough music for the day, I'll end with this.  It popped up on my YouTube feed when I was grooving to the oldies.  Gwyneth Paltrow is not a bad singer, but this taste like the 80s.  I can fairly smell her candle on this one (link).  

Don't listen to this one.  Just don't.  

And yes. . . Jung says everything in our dreams is us.  We are our dreams.