habitually probing generalist

If blogging about blogging is called metablogging, what do you call dreaming about blogging?  Complete with trackbacks and comments.  Or is it blogging while dreaming?

Another critical question is whether it is even dreaming?  And the practical question.  What am I doing up at 4 AM blogging?  Well now.  That last one is the easy one here.  Because at some point before 3:15 AM I was no longer dreaming or sleeping; just tossing and turning and thinking.  Of course, by that point much of this had already been ‘written.’

After all that depressing blogging yesterday, I knew this might well happen.  I had, though, hoped to make it through the night. 

Dreaming.  What is it exactly?  How does it work?  For many years I would’ve have sworn that I did not dream.  Every great once in a while (about once a year) I might actually wake up and realize that I had been dreaming.  It always disappeared immediately though; like trying to get your hands around a wisp of fog in a sudden breeze.

I knew I must be dreaming during those years though as I was not insane; at least, not in the clinical sense.  But I did not know what it was to dream.  I had had no experience of it in many years.  Then came the awakening.  An awakening in manifold ways.

My soul began to stir.  It attempted to throw off years of serious, deep depression.  It wanted to engage with the world.  This has been a long, painful awakening but as I said yesterday, I will not ever go back to sleep in that manner again.

The depression, of course, did not go away on its own.  Hell, it’s not gone and I doubt it ever will fully disappear.  But it is now a fundamentally different thing that it was before the awakening.  It is even fundamentallly different than it was during the awakening.  Now it is more a world weariness.  I look around me now and see a world of immense suffering and injustice.  I see things like I did yesterday.  Things we could change if we only decided to.  But we don’t.

But this post isn’t about that.  It is about blogging while dreaming and other tools of ‘productivity.’

I did not immediately start realizing that I was dreaming after waking up from my long slumber.  Oh no.  That took a few other inputs.  Stress and/or medicines.  But let’s be honest here.  They are really drugs.  Even if officially endorsed by the political powers and the insurance plan.

My job previous to coming to grad school was extremely stressful for many reasons.  Many were directly work related; some were not.  One of my first tasks was to implement reserves and e-reserves when we switched to Voyager.  I had no access to the manuals, little documentation of any sort, and an extremely generic, consortial-wide, test database that looked little like what it would when we went live.

It was about this point that I started spending whole nights, night after night, for months, not knowing if I even slept.  Or maybe I was just dreaming very lucidly.  But I worked through a lot of complex problems during this time.  During the day the stress and depression would take over and my mind wouldn’t work so clearly.  But at night, boy did she work.  I wrote papers in my head, worked through complex philosophical issues, solved many Voyager reserve problems, and more importantly, actually realized what Voyager was doing behind the interface(s) so that I knew why something worked as it did.

Yes, I was also taking 2 classes a semester during this whole period.  Classes like those that I wrote the Todorov, totalitarianism, and Kundera stuff for.  So while this was work and stress on top of an already stressful full-time job, besides my wonderful boss, it may well be a large part of what kept me the slightest bit sane and in touch with reality.

At some point early on, after getting insurance, I did try a few antidepressants.  They did nothing for me.  So time went on.  New issues arose at work.  Eventually I had no choice but to try again.  My mind was telling me things I did not want to hear.  And as I sank deeper and deeper they began to make sense, in a sick twisted sort of way.  And as much as I knew the reasoning was wrong, it was also very right.  The mind can and does switch to a completely different form of logic when it is severely distressed.  That is the critical point those who have never been clinically depressed or have wondered how a loved one could commit suicide must understand.  It is not that the person is not rational.  They may well be more rational than you.  Whether or not that is the case, it is a completely different form of rationality based on a different kind of logic.  But it is a coherent logic though.  Arguments make sense; they are built on premises and conclusions follow logically; they cohere.  The primary difference, but certainly not the only one, is which premises get accpeted to start with, and why.

Every once in a while, maybe when I was working on a paper and ‘normal’ rationality would prevail via years of training, I knew that I was in trouble.  So I finally sought out a new doctor who tried a different medication.  This one actually helped.  But it also had unacceptable side effects which eventually after much improvement caused me to stop taking it.  It was not sustainable by any means.

This drug did make me sleep.  It also caused the most bizarre dreams, or "abnormal" dreams as the manufacturer lists it.  What the heck is an abnormal dream?  But dream I did.  Long and loud and in full surround.  Often they were erotic.  I can understand a medication causing dreams; but causing erotic dreams?  Yes, that is a specifically listed side effect of this drug.  Increased dreaming, particularly of an erotic variety.  Tell me again how these aren’t drugs?

Of course, all this abnormal dreaming (and sleeping) completely shut down the productive, if not exactly restful, nights.  Another thing it shut down was the amazing things going on in the shower.  This was simply so incredible that my boss began routinely asking me what I was thinking about in the shower.

I have no idea where this had come from or how, but I certainly wish it would come back.  Seems that when I’d hop in the shower, mornings usually, my mind would go into some weird sort of overdrive.  So much so that I wanted not simply a water-proof tape recorder, but an automatic mind recorder.  This was since I’d usually be well into an exquisite thought process before I even realized it and a minute or two had already gone by.  And this process seemed to work much like waking up from my sporadic dreams before the awakening.  Like trying to get your hands around a wisp of fog in a sudden breeze.

I could usually remember the topic and the gist but not the beauty or the elegance.  I composed some of the most beautiful paragraphs my mind has ever contemplated for my papers.  A perfect combination of analysis, synthesis, and use of langauge all at once.  I worked out complex philosophical positions and elegantly and clearly elucidated them.  I solved many of my Voyager issues, to include comprehending the twisted logic that made the system work the way it did.  I would often weep at the beauty of what my mind was coming up with, only to know that the beauty and most of the details would all be stripped away by the time I had dried off and got near pen and paper.

This still happens on the very rare occasion, but not nearly to the depth and complexity of before.  Mind recorder or not, even restricted to the shower, I want this daily beauty back.

So why was I blogging while dreaming last night?  And by the way, this post is the metapost that got ‘written’ after the blogging while dreaming part.  This is most likely the result of being mostly awake and thinking.  I have no idea what the original blog post was about.  I mean really, I was dreaming.

I imagine it is because of the stressful and depressing subjects I dealt with much of yesterday.  It is also because it is near the end of the semester and it is a natural point in the stress cycle of my life.  I did not do enough work during break.  I spent  Thanksgiving alone due to illness. 

But I will be OK.  I am in much better shape at this point than I normally have been for several years now.  Progress is, sometimes, good.  I will get everything done for school that needs to be done, and do it well.  I will accomplish other things that are important to me.  Some things will slide again.  But they will be things like cleaning the apartment.  And I will again sleep, perchance to dream.

[Wow!  Much of the night and almost 3 hours, after getting up, to write this.  Welcome to the working week.]