neocitran

The thing I've found about Neo-Citran is that it gives you these really intense dreams. After overdosing on pseudoephedrine last night, I proceeded to dream that two of my friends, Patrick and Qelsey, had released Charles Manson from his incarceration. Their collective plan was to destroy the University of Alberta hospital (pretty narrow minded plan if you ask me) using bombs and bullets, so I set out to stop them. Somehow I found out that there was only one supplier of C4 in the city and I met with him and bought all of it (wasn't much, like $20 worth - currency doesn't mean much in dreams apparently). I stashed the C4 in my old Yellowbird house so that they'd never find it.

The only thing left to do was make sure that Qelsey and Pat didn't get their hands on artillery. I followed Pat to the Pulse Generator, confronted him, and stole his pistol with some quick pick-pocketing. I had the idea to wait until Pat left then stash the pistol in another locker so that when he realized I'd stolen it, he'd come back and look in the wrong locker for it.

After working out, I came back to find my locker wide open and my bag rummaged through - Pat had cut open my combination lock. I high-fived myself for my ingenuity and retrieved the pistol from the other locker, then left the gym. I hopped in the elevator, but somehow it malfunctioned and started taking us to the lower floors of the hospital. I must have been in a special elevator because we started going down to like the 49th floor, where two janitors got off, and despite me pressing the main button like a hundred times, I managed to go down to the 70th floor (didn't even know they dug that deep) where the elevator banked into this platform where I suppose elevators go to sleep at night. I got out and there was a bunch of these floating Go-Kart things that could be driven into a tunnel and I asked them what it was and the people riding them responded, "It's Google Earth!"

At this point the elevator was out of commission and I was stuck on the 70th floor underground. I was there for about 10 minutes when all of a sudden the building rumbles and these red lights come on and then this emergency door suddenly opens and tells us all to evacuate. We run out this door and it's like a billion winding stairs that reminded me of Escher's Relativity print. It takes forever but we make our way up and the U of A building is in shambles; apparently they were able to find charges and destroy the building's outer structure. Unfortunately a win for Charles Manson.

corner

I had this dream last night where all I did was stand in front of the bathroom mirror at the gym and try to correct my posture. I would do as Dr. Magee taught us: "Suck, squeeze and squeeze", as in suck your stomach in with your abs, squeeze your ass with your glutes, then pull up your pelvic floor. This should correct your pelvis so that you achieve your slightly anterior pelvic tilt (no more than two fingers between your ASIS and PSIS), and if you tuck your chin in properly you should reach a proper alignment.

I knew this, and yet no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't do it properly. My ear, acromion and iliac crest wouldn't align, and then when I got that I looked to the front and I had this horrible deviation in my midline. I'd fix that so my nose, sternum and umbilicus would line up, but then I'd turn to look at my back and I had this raging scoliosis. I'd bend forward to see if it was just dynamic but then when I stood back up to look in the mirror I suddenly had a torticollis. I'd stretch out my sternocleidomastoid but then I found out one of my legs was longer than the other.

It was endless. Here I was, cornered in the inner cloisters of the locker room debilitated by my postural inadequacies. I woke up finally and stretched out, happy to be within the warm confines of my bed. I didn't look in the mirror when I showered this morning.

I interpret it like this. There are many things wrong with my life right now that are static, like my posture. They just happen - I know they are there and I do try to correct them from time to time but they are just habits, things that I have done and will haunt me for the rest of my life. I will progressively try to alter them but it's all that I can do.

When they truly bother me, I make an active, focused effort to try to right them. I fix one thing, only to have something else tumble on me since my focus has led me to neglect other aspects of my life. My shift in concentration leads me to forget about another thing, and pretty soon all these things add up. I start to become frustrated, to lose my balance, and life tumbles down on me. Unfortunately this is real life, not a dream, so this isn't something I can wake up from. I need to change things slowly, gradually. So whilst I do this, have patience.

Rome wasn't built in a day. Trite but true, even for me.

rocket launcher/target posture

Launcher? Posture?

Eh, a good enough rhyme.

I had this dream last night that really shook me up. I went to bed and passed out like a Grade 7 teenage girl drinking Absinthe on an empty stomach. In my dream my subconscious decided it'd be an interesting experience to try and feel what that WCB shooter felt like. I spent my dream acquiring an illegal rocket launcher and then blowing up a high profile government building. Luckily nobody was hurt in my dream but the building, which resembled the smoldering wreckage of the Twin Towers post-9/11.

I spent the rest of the my dream running from the 5-0, dodging bullets and taking shelter in abandoned warehouses with the whump whump whump of choppers flying overhead and lights invading cracks in the windowpanes. I spent the entirety of my dream pondering the ethical and moral lines I had broken and trying to come to terms with what I had done.

I woke up and thanked God it was but a dream. I pretty much was invaded by absolute guilt and the sense that the only way I could bring some semblance of justice to the situation was offing myself.

***

Last week I made a post about my recurring back pain. I was in 528 lab taking a break from manual muscle testing while my partner in crime Mankeen went to the bathroom, so I took the opportunity to flag down our TA Andrea and ask her what she thought was up with my back. I told her how the night before I had hung my legs over my bed and let gravity pull my spine and my muscles out, and how today I felt so much better from doing that. She had me perform trunk flexion and extension, then got me to explain a little bit of the history and the compensatory behaviours I performed to assist my trunk movements and minimize pain.

While she made the disclaimer that she'd have to do more testing and go through a full assessment, she said she suspected spinal disc issues. The disc protrudes when I do trunk flexion, and also when I sit with flat back while I study. My trunk hyperextension self-treatment I perform pushes the disc back into alignment, which is why I feel better. I asked her what the best interventions for this would be, and she responded with exactly what I didn't want to hear, that I needed to fix my posture.

I have to say that this day has been the most difficult day, because fixing poor posture is like one of the single hardest things to do. I have these absolutely horrible weak back muscles now because they've seemingly never done a day's work in their life, and now they have to support my trunk and allow for my bedraggled lumbar spine to undergo more lordosis. I was studying and trying to keep a straight back but the weariness of my postural muscles was ruining my concentration.

I have this intense fear of being disabled by the time I'm like 25 due to a slipped disc, which is why I figure I should start today and prevent injury.

rocket launcher // target posture

cadaver palaver

I think that cutting up a dead body is really wreaking havoc on my subconscious, even if I think that it's pretty darn sweet to see anatomy in the flesh (literally). We just switch the words around from corpse to cadaver when we mean to look at it from a health sciences perspective, but do words really change all the meaning? Regardless of whether its a dead body being autopsied or a dead body donated to study, it's still a human body, and we are still cutting it open and peeking at its contents. I feel a certain sense of fascination and wonder every time I open our cadaver up, but then this scent of glycol mixed with formaldehyde fills my nostrils and I have to suppress the urge to vomit into the chest cavity and float the heart to the surface for I feel I have no heart. I should pray before I dissect.

You tell me if it's bothering me. Last night I had this dream:

Mag, Christina and I were walking down this street in some urban metropolis. There was this gigantic building that Mag and Christina insisted had all sorts of cool stuff inside, so they hopped behind the wall dividing the street with the building while I continued walking along the street. I could hear them giggling and cajoling, and then all of a sudden Mag comes running out. The wind had picked up severely and was billowing underneath the underside of her sweater, lifting both the sweater and the backpack she was carrying up in much the same way an umbrella gets caught in the storm. She was holding on for dear life but the wind was picking her up and carrying her away, so at the last second she let go and dropped to the earth and her backpack and sweater went flying.

We began chasing it down. We recovered the purple sweater which fell some few blocks away, but the backpack was making off like a kite severed from its grounding string. We were forced to cut through this alley that led to someone's backyard, but the backyard was these rolling mounds of dirt kind of like moguls or those bumpy stretches you see in motorcross. I told Mag to stop but she had already raced ahead across the expanse, and you could see the mounds start to move and roll and Mag was trying to avoid them but then she moved out of my line of sight and I was forced to run in after her. The mounds figured Mag was too fast to catch and they started zoning in on me, and Christina and I ran towards the near exit to avoid it, leaving Mag behind. Just as we were jumping over the fence and out of the backyard, one of the mounds rises up and shows its true form - they're DIRT ZOMBIES out to eat our brains!!!

Christina and I desperately try to rendezvous with Mag on the other side of the fence, but she's nowhere to be found. We circle back and head down this tunnel we saw earlier which leads to darkness. I lose Christina in the process (its okay she likes exploring...?) but I do manage to find Mag after wandering the labyrinth which goes on for like 20 minutes in my dream. Mag has been converted to a dirt zombie and is mindlessly dissecting a row of human cadavers. I think she smells my brain because she turns towards me when I enter the room, growls in the same way she growls when she wants me to make her something to eat, and starts walking towards me. I know I'm effed because in my dream I will either kill Mag's doppelgänger or she will rip me apart and gnaw on my cranium. I do the only trick I know how to do and wake up.

tumor paint

Had this Bizarro dream last night. A team of stuffed animals and I were excising a tumor out of Jia's feet, presumably what was the actual root cause of his plantar fasciitis. We successfully removed the tumor, which was gray and large and resembled a clay version of the biceps brachii muscle, and put it in a red plastic pail, the kind you take to the beach.

Not much later that day, I walked into my room and the walls were painted these thick gobs of gray. My laptop was also covered in gray, viscous material, and then I suddenly realized that it was a family tradition to remove evil spirits from tumors by painting the walls with tumor paint. My dad had taken the liberty of smearing Jia's tumor all over the walls.

I was most disturbed by the thick globs on my Compaq laptop, so I began using my hands to try to dig it off. It came off slowly, in the same way you try to peel rubber off some surface, but it did come off. I threw it in the garbage.

Later on I went to eat and forgot to wash my hands before I ate, and then I thought about maybe I'd get oral cancer because of it. The shock of having oral cancer scared me so much that I woke up.

4 days

I had this dream last, last night that was slightly unnerving. I was in our angiography unit in Rm. 3 which is the room we do cerebrals in. I had just woken up from the procedure and was sitting in the bed and Dr. Ashforth comes out from behind the lead wall and tells me that there was a gigantic aneurysm in my brain and there is no way he can do a coiling or any type of surgical intervention. He then drops the bomb - in less than 4 days I will die, but the problem is that he has no idea when exactly it will happen and that I should probably avoid doing anything strenuous or sudden so avoid making it explode.

I just remember the whole entire dream being really sad and thinking about things we normally don't think about. Looking at it simply, my first Ur defense is shattered since I no longer denied the inevitability of death. I remember contemplating whether or not it would be fair to propose and get married to Mag because I'd be dead in a few days, or whether I should just let her go on and possibly find someone else in the future. I thought about making a will, but I don't have much stuff so it'd all probably go to Mag. I thought about how sad it was that I worked all summer and that I spent so much time working on physio applications and all of it being very meaningless.

I remember this one moment where we ended up eating at pho with me, Mag, Ellis and Will, and Mag and I just started crying together while Ellis and Will kept eating their pho none the wiser. Then Mag reminded me I probably shouldn't have any excessive emotions in case that might kill me and that dissolved the moment. The part that scared me the most was that the whole dream radiated with an air of tension, a constant niggling worry I couldn't avoid. I felt like I was constantly writing a final exam for four days straight.

I have to say waking up to darkness and the knowledge that I was not going to die in four days (actually, who really knows?) was very well received by me. I've never been happier to see 3:46 AM on my alarm clock.

dreams

I dream a lot; blame it on the overactive imagination or an overexcited subconscious. I had two really big dreams yesterday, the latter the most important one, but I'll tell you both.

In the first dream I had stolen the technicolor dreamcoat from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and was parading around residential with it. I befriended a newspaper clipping of an M.C. Escher homage done by Bizarro, which would become animated when I pointed at it and thought really hard. (Anyone close to me know I absolutely adore Escher's work, so this is fantastic - I cried out loud when I saw it in the comics)



Anyways, when I pointed at it and thought really hard, it would turn into a real life coat made of newspaper to accompany my technicolor dreamcoat, and we would go around scaring crows and chasing children and stuff. We came by this bully's house and the three kids came out and so to ruffle their feathers I animated the coat and had it chase these kids who were scared stiff. They ran into their garage and the coat was in there with them, but then they closed the garage and then my pointing didn't work because I couldn't point at the newspaper through the garage door. I ran inside and the kids had shredded the newspaper, and then they proceeded to beat the shit out of me.

***

My second dream is a little strange because I have never talked to God before. They always say you know when God appears before you but I have never had it happen before so I wouldn't know. Of course it's in a dream, but I still think God comes to you any time he wishes, whether you're awake staring at the Sun or asleep staring at the Sun in your sleep. So I'm sitting on the porch with Blacky wandering around in front of me and God comes out of the house and takes a seat next to me on the swing. He didn't look like anything to be honest, but in the way you know in dreams, I knew this was God. He was looking at Blacky all funny and then proceeded to tell me everything that was wrong with Blacky and how Blacky was going to die soon because he was old and he was getting really sick. He told me exactly the day Blacky was going to die and I was crying so hard because I love Blacky and I won't want him to die.

I turned towards God and through the tears I pointedly exclaimed, "Fuck you!"

God then turned away and said,
"You'll learn to love everything I do."

I then woke up to the sound of an annoying crow cawing and I wished I had my amazing technicolor dreamcoat and my newspaper clipping coat to go scare it away.

silent night

I once applied for this job at the University for some professor in the arts psychology department. He was doing some long term study on dreams, a lot of psychoanalysis Freudian-type babble. Even though all I'd be doing was analyzing data and pencil pushing for some experimental research that wasn't remotely related to anything I studied in school (I hate arts psychology with a passion), I really wanted the job. Something about the mental processes that accompany REM sleep make me wonder if consciousness is simply a product of our mind - if when we sleep our random electrical impulses place us in a different world that is fabricated by us, and if so, is this world we inhabit a seemingly tangible form of those same processes. It's a lot of skepticism and speculation and probably parapsychology as well, but how cool would it be if an idea like the Matrix was something that could be done?

Anyways, I really wanted the job because I wanted to see how dreams are analyzed. I never understand what they represent, and I don't think anyone does, but if there's a way to find out I'd love to see what I'm thinking in the dark hours of the night. I had this dream last night that went like this:

***

The first thing I remember was me and Jonah Hill marching into an underground parking lot to jack someone's car. I look for a snazzy coupé, but of course Jonah yells at me: "Are you stupid? Alarm!" He finds a the older shoebox model of the Jeep Cherokee in white, pops it open like he's a professional at this, hotwires it and we gun off.

For some reason, I know our destination is the Fantasyland ballroom at West Edmonton Mall, the way you know in dreams that you're headed somewhere important to do something important because both of you are wearing tuxedos. Jonah's gunning it because we're late and we have to pick up Toyz, but we end up not doing that because he calls and says he'll meet us there.

We arrive at our destination and I'm paraded down the red carpet but I'm not talking to any of the paparazzi because suddenly I'm holding a violin case and I need to get inside because it's going to start soon. We walk in and Mr. Olson from my high school is giving a speech to the Board of Directors and it's really important. I walk in and they all look at me and then someone yells to use the side door and I do that. Mag suddenly appears and tells me I'm going on in a moment and that I'd better hurry up and practice.

In my head I'm freaking out because I'm supposed to play Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals on violin for this crowd, but I've never played the violin before except in Mag's basement when I played scales and she tricked me into playing Mary Had a Little Lamb. I remember how to hold it at least, but then I realize that the bow I thought I was holding was actually the programme and I have to go grab the bow, but the bow has somehow gotten really large and won't come out of the case. People are clapping because Mr. Olson has just introduced me and they're just waiting for me to come out on stage and perform. I get the bow out and try to play a note but it keeps growing on me and the strings have become large filaments resembling Enokitake mushrooms. I can't play a note and the clapping has stopped and I can hear hushed tension and Mr. Olson is giving me a look to the wings like, "HURRY UP." I sit down, exasperated because I can't do anything and as I'm just beginning to lose all hope and I am filling with humiliation, someone in the crowd starts singing the first verse of Silent Night. People join in, and soon there's this huge chorus of Silent Night and Mr. Olson looks happy and I am suddenly filled with the fullest sense of relief.

Silent night, Holy night,
All is calm, all is bright...