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Location: Home.
Listening: "The Night I Heard Caruso Sing" by Everything But The Girl.

A very strange side-effect of my illness is, apparently, very vivid dreams that I remember almost to the detail upon waking. These have taken the form of a series of dreams that I've been having since Saturday involving my having very long conversations with Austin in various locales--the majority of them foreign (the last one, on Monday, was somewhere in Scandinavia, sitting with coffee by a window, with snow blowing against the pane). There doesn't seem to be any sort of theme to these conversations; we simply sit and talk. There is no discernible emotion associated with these dreams either; we simply sit and talk. Strange.

Last night was different, and much less pleasant. I dreamt that I was living somewhere with Peter--except that Peter was a considerably older Romanian gentleman. I recognized his accent, but I don't recall having one myself. He was very ill, with what appeared to be pneumonia, and finally fell asleep in a very small bed, wheezing. The wheezing somehow became a refrain or a chant, the words of which terrified me. I tried to wake him, but he wouldn't wake, and I found myself running down a narrow white hall to find my mother, cleaning the bathroom at the end of the hall, in a thin, bright turquoise sweater with a fringed hem. I tried to explain to her that he was very sick, and I needed her help to wake him, but she simply looked very angry, brushed her hair back from her face, and said something to the effect of "I'm sick of dealing with him. Let him help himself.". She then closed the door, leaving me to pound on it, screaming. I ran back down the hall to the bedroom, where I again tried to wake him and stop the terrible snoring. I woke briefly then, to find Peter snuggled up against me and, indeed, snoring loudly in the same tone as in the dream, but lacking the underlying refrain. I rolled him slightly over, put my cheek to his shoulder, and fell asleep once more.

I fell asleep, and then back into the same dream. This is not terribly unusual for me, but it was absolutely horrible in this case. I tried to recognize and take control of the dream--which I can occasionally do--but nothing seemed to work. I tried to shake the dream-Peter awake, again to no avail, and woke abruptly, my heart racing. I whimpered and tried to burrow further under the covers. Peter was still snoring, but I finally managed to get back to sleep.

My second (third?) dream consisted of attending a party in a much larger version of Williams' apartment complex in Palms. The entire complex had somehow been transformed into one multi-storied building with dozens of raver-boys occupying it. I was driving several other party-goers and, after dropping them off, parked my car, and ventured into the house. I roamed from floor to floor, dodging boys with dark goatees, baggy pants, candy necklaces, and knit caps. Someone was in the kitchen area (everything in the house was white, the refrigerator was chrome), setting up turntables on the island. Others surrounded him, dressed in various bright colors, running wires and tossing around records. I suddenly became concerned about my the location of my car and went to look for it, as I couldn't remember where I'd parked it. I ran to the roof and peered down into the large parking lot on the patio connected to the third story. Cars were parked haphazardly, but I couldn't find mine in the crowd. I asked a boy who looked a lot like my friend Senyo from Virtualis (and who was carefully polishing a racing-green, chopped VW squareback) if he'd seen my car. He shook his head and mentioned that anyone who'd parked on the lawn was going to be towed because of one of the "uncool" folks living in the house. I asked him to direct me to the lawn, but he was rummaging in the backseat and didn't hear me. So I ran back down the stairs and out the front door to find myself directly on the street. I had no idea where the lawn was. I wandered West LA, with birds whirling overhead, looking for my car. I became more and more anxious, thinking about the $100/day mandatory towing fee in Los Angeles, until I thought I heard my Saturn's alarm. I woke to my alarm clock indicating that it was time to take another pill.

I've spent the rest of the day lounging on the sofa and reading a little in my Japanese For Beginners book, feeling achy and generally unwell. I realized at some point that I had taken my temperature four times in three hours and had been fretting. I hadn't even noticed; it's become so second-nature that it's like background music. Bah. So I took a bath, my muscles relaxed, and I'm no longer achy. The medication has already reduced some of the swelling and the random shooting pains are almost gone as well. The zinc seems to make my throat scratchy, though, so I'm steering away from that. I despise being ill--and, while the meds are working well, it seems, I really don't know how I feel about these dreams. One takes the good with the utterly surreal, though, I suppose.