Fever Dreams · 3:00am May 17th, 2018
Something strange happened after I married my wife: I can dream now.
I'm really not a fan. Dreams seem to be a random smattering of unpleasant material mashed up in uncomfortable ways. It takes away the void that was my sleep before and replaces it with bizarre hallucinations the likes of which I find barely comprehensible. It just feels mysterious, y'know? I get married and now sleep next to the wife of my dreams... and she [gifts||curses] me with the ability to dream.
Most of the dreams are the type of thing where 30 seconds after waking up, I do not remember anything that happened except a vague sense of anxiety.
What's ratcheted the dreams up to eleven, has been this fever I've been saddled with for the last week. It's been torture. I do not handle missing work well. I always fear that it looks like I'm some lazy employee when I'm gone a long time. And according to the doctor I visited, this is a two week long fever.
Symptoms include:
Extreme Heat— Sweating and sweating like that sweaty guy everyone meets eventually. Only with this sickness I AM sweaty guy.
Extreme Cold — I sat in a hot car in the middle of the afternoon for a half hour. It felt like I was shivering in an igloo the entire time.
Dizziness and Vertigo — Sometimes when I take a step my brain-eye coordination decides to ctrl-alt-delete for a half a second until rebooting
Sore throat — The doctor confirmed that this was not, in fact, strep throat. Bullet dodged there.
Nausea — I've thrown up twice. I'm not even sure if I needed to or I just made myself throw up to see if that would miraculously fix me. It didn't.
The worst seems to have passed and I'm lucid enough to type this, but two frickin' weeks is a long time to be contagious with a bomb like this.
And it was devastating to realize that I would not be going to Everfree Northwest this year. I've never gone to a large Brony Convention. And I feel like a bit of a scumbag leaving the friends I was going to be on a road trip on with double the transportation and lodging costs they were planning for, since I'm not sharing a room anymore.
By a miracle, the Everfree staff agreed to defer my wife and I's tickets until next year, so it wasn't a complete sunk cost for me. And at least now I won't be contributing to the post con flu that plagues most conventions. I'd hate to be patient zero for that.
So if you walk away from Everfree Northwest without being sick, you're welcome!
What was I getting at? Ah yes, fever dreams. I HATE THEM. I hate them so so so much.
The main issue I have with being sick is that I want to be "productive" in some way and the productivity fix for me was just to watch a bunch of Star Trek Voyager at high speed. It's interesting watching the ebb and flow and problem and solution on a macro scale at high speed. Except it did downright bizarre things to my dreams.
I woke up in the middle of the night the other day and I had to convince myself that Star Trek isn't real and that I was not in fact stranded a bajillion miles away trying to get home. I suppose that's one of the issues I have the institution of stories in general: There has to be conflict. Without conflict, there is no story. Except... in my life I don't want conflict. I don't want to worry and freak out myself. I'll watch others deal through things. But stick me in the middle of a problem inside a fever dream and I'm just panicking the entire time until I wake up.
Luckily I've been drinking so many fluids I wake up pretty much every hour of the night. So whatever dreams I have are interrupted quickly. But it's still so... scary.
If there's anything I've gotten from the fever dreams, it's a possible series idea for a new Star Trek show, this one entirely home based. The central conflict involves the designer (and since dreams include involuntary self-inserts, that role falls to me) of the interfaces on the space ship, and the bosses at central command.
A space ship could be designed with a single button. Push button, go fast, where you have in mind, safely.
Except the ships in Star Trek are painfully complicated. Problems occur because the crew make mistakes. But those mistakes could easily be solved with clear design differentiation and hierarchy. EXCEPT—and this is discussed at length by the bosses at central command—a star ship MUST be complicated to fly. They only want the best flying out of here with these things. People that spent years studying schematics that could have been simplified. It's an artificial smartness barrier designed to only keep those with a reasonable amount of direction following skills at the top. AND keeping the design complicated also acts as a kind of anti-counterfeiting measure by would-be enemies that would love to steal a ship, but can't make heads or tails of the bizarre user interface of the Space Ship.
So basically it's a Star Trek story that involves a UX designer creating the UI for space ships.
I've lived through several different fever dreams with that plot. Based on user interviews with captains, they go through a lot of hell and they frankly need better designed equipment to help prevent mistakes. Most of their UI consists of hundreds of similar colored buttons. Who on earth has the ability to pick the right combination with blurred vision during a firefight? We're losing people out there due to bad design!
But we're also saving people by preventing ships (and valuable technology) from being stolen.
I can't stand that my fictional dream people are having difficulties D:
Because they turn into my difficulties.
So yeah. That's an original fiction sci-fi novel I could write someday.
I need to talk about Star Trek Voyager. I finished it finally and I'm glad to be done. And I now feel like I understand another 0.5% points of my fellow nerds and am better equipped to write some sci-fi. For those following along at home, my personal ranking for Star Trek Series is as follows:
1) Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Tied for 2 and 3) The Next Generation and Voyager
4) The Original Series
Seven of Nine, Voyager's Starlight Glimmer, is utterly fantastic and the best thing that happened to that show.
I also need to mention that Voyager has my all time favorite episode of Trek ever. Out of all television media ever, Star Trek Voyager was the first I've ever seen that tackled my personal worst fear: apeirophobia (Fear of the Duration of Eternity). In Season 2, Episode 18, we're met with a member of the Q Continuum (Gods, basically), who would like to die. And it goes... well... I guess I probably shouldn't say. While there's plenty I don't like about that episode, (John D'Lancie's character being suddenly misogynistic for one), I'm so happy such a subject was covered at all. And handled very, very well.
Well anyway, this post itself is a stream of conscious fever dream. I wonder if any of it made sense.
EDIT: I officially have mono.
Well darn.
The way you write puts me in orgasmic bliss whilst I mouth your words and only try to imagine the real voice behind them. What I would do to get a bed made of such wondrous...impossible glory.
P.S I only dream when I sleep on my back. (I usually sleep on my side or belly)
FRIENDSHIP OVER
jk. Hope you feel better mate
Hope you feel better
Yes! I'm glad I'm not the only person to note this. I always got such a Janeway/Seven vibe from Twilight/Starlight.
But Starlight's boobs aren't big enoughI'm always surprised by people who can't dream. Dreams are so important to me, they're like 50% of my inspiration, easily. :B I've dreamed entire movies with (mostly) coherent plots before!
Though last night was trying to contact the spirit of someone's dad with a ouija board. <.< And there were lots of "shadows with glowing yellow eyes" around the periphery. Somehow, I didn't wake up. I've kind of trained myself to do that if things start getting scary, but apparently the threshold was not reached!
I hope you feel better soon. That sounds like an awful level of sick to have.
As far as dreaming goes, I can only speak for myself, but I usually only dream when I have stuff going on in my waking life and my brain needs to put it all in order. I can only imagine how different life must be after getting married. Maybe the dreaming will fade a bit once it all starts to feel like normal life? I dunno.
(P.S. Write that novel.)
Feel better!
Also consider trying to learn tactics for lucid dreaming. If you don't like the sensation, you might as well try to assert some control. After the fever passes and you've got a little more focus, anyhow.
Also agreed that dreams are weird. I had an anxiety dream two nights ago in which I was having problems exerting myself -- unable to even work myself up to a light jog without crumpling and gasping for breath, as if I were dramatically slowed down by old age -- while trying to go to college.
I'm currently in my 40s. I think my brain is trying to force-feed me my current anxieties by giving me my 20s anxieties and 60s anxieties, and hoping that I average them.
Ah, Star Trek, my eternal pop culture black hole. I could never bring myself to actually watch anything related to it. Maybe one day...
Yay! All these comments feel like I'm being visited by my friends. Except I don't have to worry about spreading something. Thanks so much guys.
4862421
You're too kind.
If you do happen to want to hear my voice, I've done some fanfic readings before.
4862449
DS9 was ahead of its time. The latter half of it was designed to be binged watched, with every episode compounding on the previous. Definitely different than the other Treks. If I had watched back in the day, TNG may have been my favorite. But with binging DS9 is too good.
4862476
I hope so too.
4862500
Both Janeway and Seven of nine are such professionals, it's hard to see the comparison. But I totally see it now.
4862555
It's an entirely new experience for me to dream, but I imagine I could get used to it. That is really cool you can get coherent plots out of your dreams
4862579
That's probably it. I just give it time and the newness of dreaming won't be nearly as jarring.
4862915
Ugh, anxiety dreams like that must suck. Being awake is already anxiety inducing enough.
Though I definitely will do more research into lucid dreaming. Getting some kind of control over the randomness would certainly help.
4863086
Most Star Trek is designed to be picked up with little to no background. You could probably watch 5 episodes and get a pretty good idea on the whole series.
It's a bit like ponies in a way. Mostly standalone episodes, except for crazy season finales and openers.
Though never watch it at single speed. The characters talk way to slow to watch at the normal speed.
But you don't have to watch it. I am just incredibly curious about that side of fandom and wanted to watch for research purposes.
4863374
More specifically, it's when Starlight and Twilight's perspectives clash that I get this feeling. In Voyager, whenever Janeway and Seven had a disagreement, I almost always felt that Seven was correct and Janeway was not; yet, it's always Seven who's being shut down or overridden by Janeway, sometimes for reasons that amount to little more than "because I said so".
And I see a lot of that in Starlight and Twilight's relationship; Starlight wants to do things her way because her way makes sense to her and is demonstrably better if you ignore all those arbitrary social conventions, but Twilight insists on steering her on a different path because friendship and stuff. It's a relationship that I really enjoy, in both shows. :)
Have your sleeping schedule or some other circumstances changed? If I understand correctly, humans have 4-5 REM sleep phases per night and most of them contain dreams (although brains are quite versatile and all of these statements are not absolute laws). The tricky part is to remember the dream and it looks like that it's necessary to wake up during or just after REM phase, so here enters the sleeping schedule. By extension, to remember multiple dreams per single night it's necessary to have brief moments of awakefulness in just the right moments:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Sleep_Hypnogram.svg
In the light of this, maybe
is not too lucky