helen-louise's journal

Less ill, but still very sad. I was hoping the depression would have gone away by now, or at least eased a bit. If anything, it's worse. There's a whole load of nebulous feelings that I can't put words to yet.

Last night I went to bed early and slept until very late - because I was depressed and couldn't find anything I wanted to do, rather than because I needed the sleep. And I had a dream that, rather than being an only child, I was one of the middle children of 8. My parents were not quite the parents I have in real life, and it was not quite the world we currently live in - nor was it the one I grew up in. But now I feel even more lonely, because I'm missing the siblings I had in the dream who don't exist.

I went to bed at midnight last night and slept until nearly 3pm. I woke up briefly at 8am as that's when my "take pills" alarm went off - it was freezing in the house, so I staggered downstairs to put the heating on, but apart from that it was a continuous zonk-out. Remember I said you don't get enough sleep in hospital? The last night I was in, I'd had all the needles removed from my arms, and I only had to take pills - but nonetheless, I wasn't allowed to go to sleep until 11pm and got woken up at 6am. I can't function on 7 hours sleep normally, let alone when I'm ill...

Had a bunch of extremely bizarre dreams last night, including:
1) a dream featuring Richard & I having an argument about the amount of smoke in a restaurant, running up lots of stairs with candlelit alcoves, and ending up in a beautiful roof garden, where we had soup and salad.
2) a dream where I was re-landscaping a distant railway station to have wheelchair access up to a 30 foot wooden statue of Nelson Mandela that was on the hill next to the station. This was the only reason why anyone would want to visit said station, as there was nothing else there.
3) going to Seattle to find the recipe for the cinnamon-and-chocolate-chip cookies that I'd eaten at alt.polycon 7 in 1995 (?!)
4) picking up a certain ex there and reconnecting over a long walk in a strange countryside that was sort-of based on the area around my primary school, only not quite.
5) buying a flute (musical instrument), and having the choice between different grades of flute, that were all the same in terms of the number of notes they had, but grade 1 flutes were thin-tubed and needed little effort to blow, while grade 6 flutes were two inches in diameter and needed a huge amount of puff to make music with.
6) an excellent dream in which artremis and I were going around a strange town buying badge-making materials and ordering some custom-made t-shirts. Except after I'd made the design and emailed the gif to them, it turned out the minimum order was 100. So I distracted the assistants then shoplifted £4-worth of crappy vests. (WTF?)
7) being a police officer telling off some kids for skateboarding over gravel and telling them instead to skateboard on the crazy golf course.
8) being a champion skateboarder who could fly.
9) going with x_mass and alexa_robinson on the train somewhere, except we had to keep going backwards and forwards, and had to use fake tickets because we couldn't afford real ones.
10) picking up a cute girl in the process, and wanting to have HOTT SEXX with her until it turned out that she had a heart defect and couldn't. Then she disappeared.
11) lost in a cobble-stoned town where I didn't speak the language or have a map, I eventually found a shop that sold china, and went in there to see if I could colour-match my Ikea plates with matching mugs. (This actually has basis in reality - we have some gorgeous purple plates that we're trying to find mugs for).
12) going into some kind of bad fanfic Harry Potter universe, where external authors could randomly rub out or change things as we were experiencing them.
13) reorganising my freezer with the help of Marks & Spencer and someone I used to be at secondary school with. Also, putting frozen soy mince into Jiffy bags(?) labelled "SOYA MINCE" before stuffing them into the drawer.
14) trying to persuade Harry & Ron that they shouldn't enter a music competition with a Jackson 5 impersonator when they'd only just started writing music, but Ron kept flushing himself down the toilet.
15) flying to a strange island where there were many monkeys and trees with bananas, oranges and pears.

This entire dream sequence was like one huge dream where one theme merged into the next, but 3-6 were definitely the best bits.

I feel like ick. Migraine-y thing today. Cancelled some of my lessons and went back to bed.

Lay in bed for several hours doing that thing where you turn over every so often to look at the clock, and see it's 50 minutes later than the last time you looked - but you're sure it's only been 10 minutes, and you're also sure you haven't been asleep because you don't remember falling asleep and waking up again. It's a very odd experience, and not very helpful, because you lose hours of time but don't actually feel any better. So I was wondering what happens. Do you:
a) lie there awake but with thoughts gradually sl..ow...i...n.....g down, so it feels like it was 10 minutes because that's the amount of thinking you normally do in 10 minutes?
or
b) fall into a very shallow stage of sleep, where you're not dreaming and haven't really started resting yet, so you don't realise you were asleep when you wake up?

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