Dreaming is such a bizarre concept. It's like we are our own little movie directors, every night weaving together a story out of our subconscious.
Even more strange are the dreams which aren't entirely remembered. These dreams are largely forgotten as soon as we open our eyes, but all it takes is just a whisper within a morning conversation for the fragments to return to conscious memory.
That is what happened to me this morning. Upon waking I was aware that I had dreamt last night, but it wasn't until I was talking with GBF over my first cup of coffee for the day that the penny dropped and I remembered a part of last night's dream.
It was night time. I was visiting a family that I didn't really know. The family was, however, relatives of Heather, my boss from last year. The mother, one of her children and I were sitting in the family's kitchen. As the mother and I chatted, the child saw a face appear in a nearby window. The face belonged to the child's father, who was a violent man and no longer lived with the family. In fear, the mother told the child to leave the kitchen and go hide in another section of the house. Once the child had fled, the father broke through the fly screened window with an ax and entered the house.
From there, the details of the dream become sketchy, however I believe that the father attacked the mother with the ax. The spirit of the family's grandmother then entered the dream. She was incensed. I could feel the spirit's ominous presence however I knew that I was safe from her wrath. It was the violent father whom the spirit wanted to kill.
That's all that I remember. What a bugger! It was certainly an "entertaining" dream to say the least. I hope the spirit was able to exact her revenge on the murderous father.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Monday, June 19, 2006
Self Harm and Emotions
Self harm ... why do we do it?
During my recent hospital stay, I self harmed quite regularly, in fact at least once every day. It wasn't until one of the nurses decided to dress my arms that I largely stopped. By covering up my "canvas" with dressings, I found it difficult to quench my self harming desires/needs.
My poison, so to speak, is burning. I find burning particularly effective because it seems to provide the release I apparently seek. When I am in the "zone", the pain feels incredibly good. Cutting doesn't do it for me. I can't cut deep enough and it generally doesn't give me the same sensation as the burning does.
So why a post on self harm? Because I engaged in a little earlier on in the evening and I have, for once, a strong awareness of why I had to do it.
I was just beginning to cook dinner. When I reached into the pantry to pull out a packet of pasta, I discovered that the packet on which I laid my hands had been previously opened and no attempt had been made to secure it shut again. Consequently, as I lifted the packet out of the pantry pasta spilled out everywhere. It made my blood boil. I stomped down the hallway to the computer room where my husband was and accused him of being careless etc.
Then I got to thinking. Boy had I overreacted. It was only a little bit of spilt, dry pasta for goodness sake and I had just about lopped my husband's head off because of it. Good grief! Anger is okay if justified and dealt with appropriately, but my little spat was completely over the top.
So, as I finished my cooking I continued to mull over what I had done. By the time I finally slid the casserole dish into the pre-heated oven, I was desperate to SH. After all, I had dealt with a situation inappropriately and allowed myself to feel anger far too intensely.
Sometimes it can be hard to understand self harm. Sometimes I do it to calm down. Sometimes I do it to come back to the real world. Sometimes I do it to escape from the real world into the fake one. Other times I seem to just do it for the hell of it. A lot of the time, I have no concrete knowledge of why I allow myself to indulge in it. In an odd way, it is good to finally exactly know why I SH'ed tonight.
During my recent hospital stay, I self harmed quite regularly, in fact at least once every day. It wasn't until one of the nurses decided to dress my arms that I largely stopped. By covering up my "canvas" with dressings, I found it difficult to quench my self harming desires/needs.
My poison, so to speak, is burning. I find burning particularly effective because it seems to provide the release I apparently seek. When I am in the "zone", the pain feels incredibly good. Cutting doesn't do it for me. I can't cut deep enough and it generally doesn't give me the same sensation as the burning does.
So why a post on self harm? Because I engaged in a little earlier on in the evening and I have, for once, a strong awareness of why I had to do it.
I was just beginning to cook dinner. When I reached into the pantry to pull out a packet of pasta, I discovered that the packet on which I laid my hands had been previously opened and no attempt had been made to secure it shut again. Consequently, as I lifted the packet out of the pantry pasta spilled out everywhere. It made my blood boil. I stomped down the hallway to the computer room where my husband was and accused him of being careless etc.
Then I got to thinking. Boy had I overreacted. It was only a little bit of spilt, dry pasta for goodness sake and I had just about lopped my husband's head off because of it. Good grief! Anger is okay if justified and dealt with appropriately, but my little spat was completely over the top.
So, as I finished my cooking I continued to mull over what I had done. By the time I finally slid the casserole dish into the pre-heated oven, I was desperate to SH. After all, I had dealt with a situation inappropriately and allowed myself to feel anger far too intensely.
Sometimes it can be hard to understand self harm. Sometimes I do it to calm down. Sometimes I do it to come back to the real world. Sometimes I do it to escape from the real world into the fake one. Other times I seem to just do it for the hell of it. A lot of the time, I have no concrete knowledge of why I allow myself to indulge in it. In an odd way, it is good to finally exactly know why I SH'ed tonight.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Home and Changes
Well, I'm home from hospital. Actually I've been home for a few days. I left hospital around lunch time on Thursday and arrived home that evening.
Thanks to everyone who left comments on my last post. It's great to know that there are people out there in blog land who care and have been in similar situations, even more so since I have been so slack with blogging of late. You guys rock!
After an increase of meds that helped lessen my constantly "stoned" feeling, I found hospital to be incredibly relaxing. Meals brought to your room, nothing to do except watch TV, read a book or sit outside smoking cigarettes watching the birds flutter around the garden ... it was great! Towards the end of my stay, despite the remaining underlying feeling of sadness, I definitely felt more calm and together.
Unfortunately, just after leaving hospital, my stress levels climbed dramatically. Gawd knows why. I don't have much to be stressed about in my daily life. I guess some things don't make a lot of sense. Mind you, being home and feeling like I should be keeping busy with "wifely duties" and a husband that seems to enjoy reminding me of that fact regularly does tend to make me feel pretty inadequate. Oh well. You get that, hey.
I haven't been completely idle since returning home though. Yesterday saw another trip into the semi big smoke because Hubby had an appointment to attend. Apart from the trip, I have been playing around with making my very own blog template from scratch. I think I might just have it working properly now too. *does a happy dance* I decided to keep it black and grey because, well, you can't screw that up too much. *smiles* I'm pretty happy with the result also.
Thanks to everyone who left comments on my last post. It's great to know that there are people out there in blog land who care and have been in similar situations, even more so since I have been so slack with blogging of late. You guys rock!
After an increase of meds that helped lessen my constantly "stoned" feeling, I found hospital to be incredibly relaxing. Meals brought to your room, nothing to do except watch TV, read a book or sit outside smoking cigarettes watching the birds flutter around the garden ... it was great! Towards the end of my stay, despite the remaining underlying feeling of sadness, I definitely felt more calm and together.
Unfortunately, just after leaving hospital, my stress levels climbed dramatically. Gawd knows why. I don't have much to be stressed about in my daily life. I guess some things don't make a lot of sense. Mind you, being home and feeling like I should be keeping busy with "wifely duties" and a husband that seems to enjoy reminding me of that fact regularly does tend to make me feel pretty inadequate. Oh well. You get that, hey.
I haven't been completely idle since returning home though. Yesterday saw another trip into the semi big smoke because Hubby had an appointment to attend. Apart from the trip, I have been playing around with making my very own blog template from scratch. I think I might just have it working properly now too. *does a happy dance* I decided to keep it black and grey because, well, you can't screw that up too much. *smiles* I'm pretty happy with the result also.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Hospital Bound
I'm off to hospital. Within a handful of hours I will be in the car travelling to the semi big smoke to be admitted into hospital. I've been disso'ing a lot of late, which was neither here nor there really. I'm getting used to that sort of thing and to be quite frank, I'm beyond giving a toss.
Things have turned pear shaped now though. I disso'ed big time in front of the pdoc during our appointment this afternoon. As a result, that part of me lost its mind and uttered what it had been thinking. The pdoc wanted to admit me then and there, but luckily I had a friend with me who wouldn't have been able to get home without me there to drive the car. So, I got to come home and pack which is good.
Ahhh, but 'sigh' on the hospital thing I guess. It's been a year since I was last admitted ... and then a year before that. I wonder if this is going to become a yearly thing?
Things have turned pear shaped now though. I disso'ed big time in front of the pdoc during our appointment this afternoon. As a result, that part of me lost its mind and uttered what it had been thinking. The pdoc wanted to admit me then and there, but luckily I had a friend with me who wouldn't have been able to get home without me there to drive the car. So, I got to come home and pack which is good.
Ahhh, but 'sigh' on the hospital thing I guess. It's been a year since I was last admitted ... and then a year before that. I wonder if this is going to become a yearly thing?
Monday, April 24, 2006
I Must Be Mad
I must be a sucker for punishment. Today I embarked upon designing a website for Hubby's Guild Wars guild. (For the uninitiated, Guild Wars is an online role-playing game similar to World of Warcraft).
Hubby is going to be a difficult "client" though I think. He wants his guild's website to emulate Guild Wars' professionally designed site, including the latest news section on the site's homepage. The only way I can think of doing it so that the news section is updatable by all the guild leaders is to set it up as a blogger template. Yikes! Coding my very own blogger template so that it looks like the Guild Wars website. That's certainly going to prove a challenge!
Speaking of web designing, I started stage two of my TAFE certificate today. I learnt how to slice images, something which I have never bothered trying before. It was surprisingly simple once I worked out how to do it using Adobe ImageReady. It's kind of cool to learn something new too.
As for the age-old "how's things going" question, I'm doing okay. I've been incredibly busy this past week and as a result I am feeling quite drained. The upside is I haven't been alone with my thoughts very much which has kept my emotional life completely at bay. It was incredibly refreshing to finally have a day virtually all to myself today though. I definitely needed it.
Hubby is going to be a difficult "client" though I think. He wants his guild's website to emulate Guild Wars' professionally designed site, including the latest news section on the site's homepage. The only way I can think of doing it so that the news section is updatable by all the guild leaders is to set it up as a blogger template. Yikes! Coding my very own blogger template so that it looks like the Guild Wars website. That's certainly going to prove a challenge!
Speaking of web designing, I started stage two of my TAFE certificate today. I learnt how to slice images, something which I have never bothered trying before. It was surprisingly simple once I worked out how to do it using Adobe ImageReady. It's kind of cool to learn something new too.
As for the age-old "how's things going" question, I'm doing okay. I've been incredibly busy this past week and as a result I am feeling quite drained. The upside is I haven't been alone with my thoughts very much which has kept my emotional life completely at bay. It was incredibly refreshing to finally have a day virtually all to myself today though. I definitely needed it.
Monday, April 17, 2006
Dreams are Weird
Welcome to last night's dream! (and my second post in two days ... go me!)
The time was shortly after Christmas. I was trying to send a belated Christmas card to someone ... my father I think. I couldn't get the postage stamp to stick to the envelope properly so I didn't want to pop it into the post box for fear that the stamp would fall off. I tried to place more moisture (spit ... ewww) on the back of the stamp to no avail. I entered the post office, thinking that perhaps they had sticky tape available for customer use on one of their shelves. I spied the sticky tape at the far end of the post office.
While I was still on the street, trying to fix the stamp to the envelope, a bus rolled past. A couple of the bus's passengers were apparently staff members of the school where I used to work. An elderly lady who was standing beside me struck up a conversation about one of the teachers. She told me that the woman in question had been teaching for approximately ten years now (in reality she had been a first year teacher when I had worked at the school last). I began to tell the elderly lady as such, but she was adamant that the woman had been teaching for years, so I gave up.
All of a sudden, I found myself at a friend's workplace, but for some reason it was a mixture of his real workplace and one that I had previously worked at for a short, unsuccessful stint. I must have walked straight past the reception area without announcing myself, because I was sitting at my friend's desk using his sticky tape to adhere the stamp to its envelope. From the next cubicle, my friend acknowledged my unannounced presence. I apologised for not informing him of my being there. My friend introduced me to two of his work mates, one of whom had apparently worked there during the short time that I had worked there. This particular work mate didn't say anything about how useless I had been in the position though. Both work mates then left the room so that my friend and I could have some privacy.
Somewhere in amongst all this, I sat in on the end of a job interview for a town doctor and a water treatment plant employee. Gawd knows how I had managed to do that. There were two applicants for the doctor position and one for the water treatment plant employee. One of the applicants for the doctor's position was either Korean or Malaysian. He was a cute, youngish man who seemed much better than the other applicant, a rough around the edges white guy. During the interview, the Korean or Malaysian doctor stated that his English was not perfect, but to me he seemed to have a wonderful grasp of the English language. When meeting up with my friend at his workplace later on in the dream, I told him about the interview and how I thought the Korean or Malaysian doctor was better suited to the position. My friend agreed (somehow he had talked to the applicants as well) and we joked about how he would have to brush up on his Korean language skills.
And that was the end of my dream, or all that I can remember of it anyway. How bizarre was that! It's funny how certain snippets of reality can make it into a truly weird dream.
The time was shortly after Christmas. I was trying to send a belated Christmas card to someone ... my father I think. I couldn't get the postage stamp to stick to the envelope properly so I didn't want to pop it into the post box for fear that the stamp would fall off. I tried to place more moisture (spit ... ewww) on the back of the stamp to no avail. I entered the post office, thinking that perhaps they had sticky tape available for customer use on one of their shelves. I spied the sticky tape at the far end of the post office.
While I was still on the street, trying to fix the stamp to the envelope, a bus rolled past. A couple of the bus's passengers were apparently staff members of the school where I used to work. An elderly lady who was standing beside me struck up a conversation about one of the teachers. She told me that the woman in question had been teaching for approximately ten years now (in reality she had been a first year teacher when I had worked at the school last). I began to tell the elderly lady as such, but she was adamant that the woman had been teaching for years, so I gave up.
All of a sudden, I found myself at a friend's workplace, but for some reason it was a mixture of his real workplace and one that I had previously worked at for a short, unsuccessful stint. I must have walked straight past the reception area without announcing myself, because I was sitting at my friend's desk using his sticky tape to adhere the stamp to its envelope. From the next cubicle, my friend acknowledged my unannounced presence. I apologised for not informing him of my being there. My friend introduced me to two of his work mates, one of whom had apparently worked there during the short time that I had worked there. This particular work mate didn't say anything about how useless I had been in the position though. Both work mates then left the room so that my friend and I could have some privacy.
Somewhere in amongst all this, I sat in on the end of a job interview for a town doctor and a water treatment plant employee. Gawd knows how I had managed to do that. There were two applicants for the doctor position and one for the water treatment plant employee. One of the applicants for the doctor's position was either Korean or Malaysian. He was a cute, youngish man who seemed much better than the other applicant, a rough around the edges white guy. During the interview, the Korean or Malaysian doctor stated that his English was not perfect, but to me he seemed to have a wonderful grasp of the English language. When meeting up with my friend at his workplace later on in the dream, I told him about the interview and how I thought the Korean or Malaysian doctor was better suited to the position. My friend agreed (somehow he had talked to the applicants as well) and we joked about how he would have to brush up on his Korean language skills.
And that was the end of my dream, or all that I can remember of it anyway. How bizarre was that! It's funny how certain snippets of reality can make it into a truly weird dream.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Blog Neglect
My poor little blog! It's been ages since I posted and even longer since I posted regularly. What a serious case of neglect! It's amazing that my blog is still breathing! I should be arrested or something!
The truth is that things have been pretty sucky for a while now. There's been no real reason for it. There never is. I just fell into a bad head space and it's been bloody near impossible to claw my way out of it. The dreaded "D's" returned with a vengeance. I've been feeling really down and I still feel like someone else has invaded my body and is doing all the moving and talking for me. Grrr! Stupid brain! I just wish it would end!
So, what's the best treatment for being in a sucky place? Getting together with a friend who is damn near close to being as insane as you are, laying in the slightly overgrown and moist grass in his back yard in the middle of the night and taking the most bizarre photos of anything and everything.
And here are the results! Top left are my feet which apparently come with their very own green halo. Middle right is me in the middle of some sort of bizarre yoga position. Finally, bottom left is my friend's and my version of a full moon etch-a-sketch.
Mmmm ... there was definitely substance abuse happening that night I think. *smiles*
Weirdness aside, I am now officially on Easter break from my TAFE course. Despite everything, I was able to successfully finish off all my assessment pieces before the end of the term. I've even already enrolled in the next stage of the course which either starts on the 19th according to my TAFE tutor or on the 24th according to the TAFE customer service person whom I spoke to when I re-enrolled. Hey, you got to love how TAFE operates!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)