Bittersweet dreams, Phenibut, and mutual exclusion · 8:47pm Jan 18th, 2021
I've found that since I've been taking phenibut with my quetiapine each night to fight my insomnia, that:
- My bruxism is not as bad;
- I don't seem to suffer quite as much from xerostomia quite as much;
- I actually get three hours or so of unbroken sleep at a time; and
- I have been having these bittersweet dreams about my childhood homes.
I keep dreaming about my home town itself or parts of it that meant so much to me (many of which no longer exist). I dream about people I knew in my childhood, many of who have since passed away. My dreams have also included games or toys that were significant to me when I was younger. And yet all of these dreams inevitably involve stressful aspects of my job in them. My dream last night started off so beautifully. I was in my childhood bedroom and playing with my Lego ... and yet towards the end of that dream, I found myself staring at a list of tickets from work telling me to get particular parts of my Lego built.
I am happy to say that my dear mate Mark "Seppo" Seppings has not made an appearance. After he was killed in that motorcycle accident on the 20th of December, 2010, I had nightmares about him for a year. In some of those dreams, I was in the ambulance crew that attended the crash site. I remember one of those dreams where we arrived at the accident scene, and my friend Mark was sitting on the side of the road and just smiling at me - not a mark on him. I kept trying to scream at the other crew members that he was alive, but they insisted he was dead. Then I had nightmares where I would be walking through my house, unable to find anybody else there. I remember one dream that really shattered me, when I walked into my kitchen and there he was - standing there, smiling at me, not saying a work. I work up gasping and terrified.
But - I am not having those dreams anymore! The phenibut and seroquel combination seems to be working.
My principle source of stress right now is my job. I know that any day now they will decide I am not good enough for them and lay me off. Every time I get an email, or a slack notification, or an SMS message, or a phone call, anything at all ... and my heart begins to race. Any contact whatsoever from my coworkers leaves me drenched in a cold sweat.
Any day now ... I will be jobless.
I am going on record RIGHT NOW, stating that. Mark me on it - any ... day ... now.
My current hurdle at work is with getting a docker container for our web server to allow PHP to use semaphores. It remains a mystery to me that this functionality is not enabled by default, and that the PHP functionality to handle semaphores and mutual exclusion will not wrap the underlying system architecture. You should not need to know that the mechanics of the semaphores underneath your function/method calls is on Unix, Linux or Windows.
In the meantime, I am back working on my poor story.
I was off by a few months.
It took them until the 28th of May to lay me off, but they finally did.
I'd been waiting for the axe to fall, and it finally did.