Save Me From My Fragile Little Mind

So, the last few days I've been in a bit of a strange condition. My body has been out to get me, muscles cramping, joints protesting, legs going out from under me, hands dropping things, throat on fire, you name it. But my brain (and it is there, they've checked) has been probably the best it's been this year, and I've managed to get a load of important stuff done in terms of filing, phone calls, and plotting what to do once my body is behaving again.

As you might imagine, I'm having quite a bit of trouble sleeping. I lie there in bed thinking "tired, want to sleeeeeeeep" but the physical aches and pains just keep on shouting at me. Last night I gave up. As well as my usual painkillers I took a little bit of Diazepam, which is lovely stuff for relieving muscle pain and also for helping me get to sleep. It's also really easy to build up a tolerance to it, or become addicted, which is why I only let myself use it a couple of times a month.

Thus followed a night of sleep, yes, but unusually also of bizarre dreams, some of which I remember very clearly.

The first one I can remember is one I've had a few times now. There's a big house with a big driveway and big gardens... and hundreds upon hundreds of cars. But the whole property appears deserted. I go into the house and start exploring (not sure why) and eventually find a room where a girl who looks a bit like my sister is lying in a kind of suspended animation. As I walk in she "comes to life" and explains that she's really eighty years old, and that the house is owned by her boyfriend who's a bit of a mad scientist character. He keeps arranging parties and meetings and the suchlike at the house and then kidnapping the attendees, taking them down to the cellar, and sucking out their life-force to keep her young and pretty. She doesn't mind so much but it would be nice for her if she could have a chat with them first as she's tired of never leaving the house and only seeing Mad Scientist Boyfriend. Enter Mad Scientist Boyfriend himself, who starts chasing us both around the house and gardens, waving a machete in one hand and a Standard Mad Scientist Green Bubbling Beaker in the other.

The second is one I've had since I was about six. Imagine a really BIG apartment building in a huge city, with metal fire-escapes criss-crossing the whole side of the building. Imagine something like a cross between the Marble Zone and the Star Light Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog. A nameless and terrifying figure in black (Death, the Wicked Witch, a creature made of binbags, depending on my age and frame of mind) is chasing me around the web of fire escapes. Like Sonic, the action is entirely in 2-D, although every so often I bang on one of the doors on the "back wall" if I can see light, hear voices, etc. No one ever answers.

The final dream I had was the strangest. It wasn't one I've had before and involved a fair few Real People.

It started on a film set for a Thomas the Tank Engine movie, although sometimes it was a movie and sometimes it was "real life". The train drivers were all people I knew though - Steve, Pip, The Goldfish, Aibee and Daniel, my parents, all there. There was also Tom Reynolds driving Bertie the Bus. I regret to inform my readers that I cannot remember (ahem) who took the part of the Fat Controller.

Everyone had their own little bit of storyline doing what they did best. The Goldfish and me came up with an ingenious scheme to make Annie and Clarabel completely accessible (alas, I can't remember the details). Pip built the extra parts and Steve wired and programmed it all, and while Annie and Clarabel were out of action being modified, Tom Reynolds and Bertie the Bus did a sterling job of driving the passengers at breakneck speeds to meet their connections at the next station where Aibee and Daniel were waiting. We'd just finished the modifications when he pulled up in Bertie and said that they'd been offered a job as an ambulance helping Harold the Helicopter (as piloted by Dominocat.

We all went to, er, "somewhere" to celebrate, it was a large theatre but seemed to be a house as well. We decided to play hide and seek upon which Reynolds announced that he had been Shakespeare in a former life (everyone accepted this quite happily) and knew all the secret passages in the theare. He helped me to the stage, pressed a few bits of wall, and then hid me behind a curtain, all the while insisting that it was the safest, most secret place there was. Then he dashed off to help other people and I saw that everyone was hiding in various curtains, except Pip's Littlun, who was counting, and Steve, who was making everybody a drink and telling us we must be found before our tea got cold. Reynolds came back saying he'd run out of blankets and could he borrow my curtain, so we pulled it down...

I woke up completely under my duvet.
I have decided that I must spend less time with the Littlun, less time playing counting-games with the Littlun, less time watching Thomas the Tank Engine with the Littlun... it's only a mercy that I haven't really been involved in the potty-training effort.

Edit/Update: I've been having trouble hearing and this afternoon my left ear started leaking pus, so I rang NHS direct who sent me to see a doctor and the upshot is that my sore throat isn't just the usual CFS sore throat, I've got an ear and throat type of infection and am running a fever with it. That explains a lot. It took about a minute and a half from me walking into the consulting room for the doctor to look in my ears and ask if I was allergic to antibiotics. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing, but nevertheless I have some tablets and should feel better within a week.