These are two loaded words that conjure up all sorts of issues for me. Nightmares are something I seemed to have had more often years ago. An old, obsolete meaning of the “mare” part of nightmare referred to an evil spirit who would visit in the night. Perhaps my current lack of nightmares might be related to my ever evolving atheism and a solidifying non-belief in many things I once consider spiritual. Or perhaps the waking nightmare of living in the era of Trump may be enough and my body calls it quits when I go to sleep fortunately shutting out the toxic brew of cable news and endless Internet blather.
My dreams these days are quite vivid but rarely of the nightmare quality. Thanks in no small part to a prostate the size of Rhode Island I get up to pee often three or four times a night. I usually am able to go right back to sleep but wake up then again multiple times often caught up in a silly but complicated dream usually involving friends and family and not infrequently San Francisco. A recent dream a few nights ago that I remember involved torrential rains in San Francisco and the small garden at the B&B I haunt was turned into a muddy mess strange since most of that garden is brick paved. My job was to try and keep the dogs from tracking mud into the house and jumping up on the guests while they were eating breakfast with very little success. Last night I was lost in a blizzard in Kansas trying to get to a dentist appointment on time though I am not sure I ever made it.
Also and I suppose this makes sense some of these waking-up dreams involve the need to find someplace to pee without getting busted by the cops. As creative as I have gotten during my waking hours in finding a place to pee, and I just learned there is a for real phone app to help with that, I am often even more creative in finding many unorthodox places to piss in my dreams.
So for whatever reason as mentioned I now have several dreams a night that I remember on waking. They just happen several times a night and I often will return to the same dream in one night. Though I don’t seem to pick up where I left off but rather start the whole thing again, perhaps my old problem with OCD coming into play.
Though I have really not traveled extensively I have gotten to Europe a couple of times. As with many things Europeans are much more practical and civilized about the need for public urination than we are at least for men it seems. I would love to see the very open but actually modest public urinals I saw and used in Amsterdam on the 16th street mall here in Denver.
Along with the frequent need to pee is the urgency that is also often associated with this. Though I cast no aspersions here I have not gone to the adult diaper yet. I do very possibly see it in my future, however. These diapers would be less necessary in our culture if there were more places available to relieve one self. Trust me pissing one’s pants can be a real nightmare depending on when and where it happens. Being a nation prone to conspiracy theories these days do you think the adult diaper industry has a lobbyist whose sole job is to limit the number of public restrooms?
Admittedly I have gotten a bit side tracked here and off topic leaving only a few words for hallucinations. I have been very fortunate to not have ever suffered from the hallucinations that can occur with both schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. The closest I have come to very scary hallucinating involved an incident I have written about for this group involving a psilocybin mushroom indiscretion and the Empire bathes back in 1978. I have though been able for more that forty years to avoid a reoccurrence of that hallucinatory episode by not doing mushrooms and avoiding any relationships that involve psilocybin-growing, cocaine addicted ER physicians, something that has been quite easy really and much more so than being able to find a place to pee.