Monthly Archives: February 2019

Sleeping Injury

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Carpet Burn

A few weeks ago I suffered a sleeping injury.  I was dreaming I was with a truck convoy heading south from Denver.  There were many identical white trucks.  I was one of the leaders.

South of Pueblo we passed some spectacular scenery looking like the red rock country in Utah.

We got into New Mexico and stopped for the night in a long tunnel.  I was asleep in the cab of my tractor-trailer rig when I woke up to see five entities coming toward me.  Four were translucent white, gliding along the tunnel.  The fifth was solid black.  They passed my truck than the black one turned and came directly toward me.  I screamed and bailed out of the truck.

The problem was I was not in a big truck, but in bed.  I must have been on my knees when I dove, because there was a loud crack when my head hit the floor and woke me up.  I sustained a carpet burn on my forehead and a concussion.  The carpet burn healed in a few days, no big deal.

The concussion was another matter.  I had some severe vertigo for a few days when I couldn’t stay upright.  I also had a steady headache and was sort of foggy.  The vertigo diminished, and the doctor gave me an exercise which eliminated it entirely.  The headache persisted for about three weeks.  The pain was about a four on a scale of one to ten.

The doctor told me to avoid bright light, including a computer screen, meaning I couldn’t write.  I don’t think I could have put something together anyway.  I rattled around the house and slept a lot.  I am mostly back to normal (whatever that is) now and back to my normal routine.

My scream woke my wife up and I dazedly crawled back into bed.  I have had intense dreams before, including some motion, but I never leaped out of bed.  In talking to other people, the events are relatively common.  One guy gets so violent in his dreams he has to sleep in a mummy sleeping bag to prevent damaging anything.

What does the dream mean?  I am told it probably means I have cleared some issues in my life up, but a big one remains.  I am slow to catch on to this stuff so it takes a whack on the head for me to get it.  I don’t like malevolent black ghosts scaring me out of bed.  Yes, I know what the issue is but I’m not telling.

Posted in Concussion, Current Activities, Dreams, Fear, Sleeping, Stories

Pride

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Pride has served me badly.  I put on a brave face all my life out of pride.  I wouldn’t acknowledge to anyone, including myself, how much I was hurting.  I was mourning my mother’s death, my rocky progress in school, my lack of athletic ability, and not understanding why I did impulsive things I instantly regretted.

I stood tall, lied, and ignored my feelings.  Fakery and bullshit were my default modes.  I’m smart, so I often got away with it unless I had to prove it.  “Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.”  I was great at counter accusations because of my well-tuned bullshit detector.   I operated this way for probably 60 years.

In more recent years I developed enough self-awareness to detect my own bullshit.  Mostly.  I knew about my ADD/ADHD and had years of therapy and various group activities to build a reservoir of mostly honest behavior.  Except for the addictions.  Pride kept them in the closet.  I drank and drugged without admitting my helplessness.

I like to accuse oil companies of lying, cheating, and stealing.  I saw it because I was doing the same thing.  About three years ago my therapist / Jungian Analyst/ Addiction Counselor looked me in the eye and said “You are an Alcoholic.” did I begin getting it.  Despite all my prideful front, I was a mess.  I quit drinking and got serious about wrestling with my non-substance related addictions.  I go to meetings, pray, and meditate.

For the first time in my life I may be getting past all the pride and deception.  I do have to say the wrestling with non-substance addiction is a win some, lose some proposition.  Maybe I have to be more honest, less secretive, and humble with my shortcomings.

Posted in ADD/ADHD, Addiction, Alcohol, Meditation, Pride, Stories

Drinking

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I don’t drink.  I am coming up on three years alcohol free.  I don’t know how many other times I have quit, starting when I was seventeen.  I started drinking when I was fifteen, if you count Coors 3.2 beer as alcohol.  It isn’t very strong, so I just drank more.  I started and stopped several times after the first time.

My mother was an alcoholic, my father drank quite a bit.  Their entire social circle revolved around drinking.  One of my mother’s best friends choked to death on her own vomit on the kitchen floor.  One of her kids found her.  Alcohol was the culture I grew up with.

One of the issues I live with is ADD/ADHD.  Growing up, I knew something was wrong – always in trouble, unable do do schoolwork I wasn’t interested in, lots of other stuff.  I thought of it as the Fatal Flaw.  I have managed to lurch along with the ADD, but it affected all my life.  My college transcript is mostly A’s and F’s.  It helped ruin my first marriage.  The deal with it, I drank and did dope.

I used to buy pot by the quarter pound.  I never bought booze in less than 1&1/2 liter bottles, beer by the case.  A friend and I would go to the beer joint and drink seven pitchers in an evening.  I smoked three packs of cigarettes every day, more when drinking.

All the drugs and alcohol were self medicating.  I was heavily medicated for a long time.  I started therapy more than 30 years ago.  It seemed to help in a lot of areas, but the addictions remained. One day in a therapy session the therapist stopped and asked me if I had ever been evaluated for ADD.  Well, no.  That evening I did a checklist.  I was 48 out of 50 questions.

That is when my life began to change.  It all took a while, I didn’t stop drinking for about fifteen years, but I was doing better in lots of other areas.  I can now do tasks I was previously incapable of even starting.  It took a lot of cognitive therapy and the stimulant medication to get my prefrontal cortex working without stirring up a bunch of drama.

You are aware alcoholics go to lots of meetings.  I go to two meetings every week.  They are a tremendous help as other alcoholics share their experience, strength, and hope.  We humans need to associate with others  and the meetings are healthier than bars.

I am fairly sure I will never drink again.  That’s good, because it would kill me.  My stomach doesn’t like alcohol and kicks up a real fuss when I drink.  I like not having my stomach hurt.

I don’t agree with all the concepts of the program, but I can live with it.  Spending time with a bunch of sober alcoholics is a constant reinforcement for my sobriety.  As we say at the end of meetings, “Keep coming back, it works if you work it.”

Posted in ADD/ADHD, Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Craving, My Story, Stories