REM Sleep, Dreams, and Blogging Dilemmas

I'm a little leery of the whole blogging phenomenon. I tend to reveal far more personal information than anyone should, most of the time. Writing is like that. I shouldn't blog. I should write fiction, cannibalizing my personal experiences (and those of friends and family) for material, but never admitting that my stories are based on real life.

It's a fairly new development, my urge to keep private information private. That doesn't mean I haven't told all my medical business on Facebook a time or two, though I did change the privacy settings so that only my friends—all 367 of my dearest and closest—could read my posts.

This is public. But we don't identify ourselves, although there are photos, and I suppose there's an off chance someone who knows me might see mine and recognize me.

It's not that I mind saying I have an ostomy... but I can't help wondering if the fact that I do was the determining factor in my employer's decision to terminate me. They blame the economy, and have eliminated the position, calling it a "reduction in force." So it is that, I suppose, but it would probably not have happened, had I not gone out on my second medical leave.

I don't seem to be able to recover from a particularly disgusting infection, so my surgeon is ordering another CT scan to see what's going on with that. I dream of waking up with no more drainage of E. coli pus, but it hasn't happened in a month.

Oh, and that reminds me—since I used the word dream—that I intended to talk about waking today from a series of memorable dreams... or a sequence... early this morning. I kept dreaming that I was applying for various types of financial assistance, and that for each application I turned in, I received five bucks. Five bucks, five bucks, five bucks...

I also dreamed that I was desperate to prevent more self-destructive behavior and possible suicide by some actor I knew. He isn't real. It was just a dream. He was a composite of two people I know and one who doesn't exist—a director who is depressed because his life partner is off with another man and he can't sell his theatre, an actor who owned a theatre with his wife and lost it and is now applying for a Pepsi grant to start over, and some famous guy who is being pursued by lots of women but hates and distrusts all of them. He was giving away all his valued personal effects to random strangers and fans who continually crowded and hounded him. I was trying to get five minutes with him to let him know I cared. He didn't want to talk. He ran from me like I was paparazzi though, in my dream, we were friends.

My friends are not famous. They do need encouragement, though—especially the one who wrote last night that his pills for clinical depression are not working. I will write or call both of those friends today.

I am still in bed and now I'm getting a headache. Who sleeps with their laptop in bed? Divorced women with sore butts from ostomies in which the anus and rectum were removed, who can't bear to sit in the desk chair and type on the iMac... I should get up and eat something and put in my contact lenses.

Thanks for sharing. I think you do have the sensibility of a fiction writer. Your paragraph on the dreams could be from a novel. Though I should say that I write novels and I don't use much from my own life. Is it because my life is boring or because I want it to be from my head? Not sure...

Sounds like you are a person who gives and gives... sitting there post-surgery and in the healing process yourself but reaching out to other friends in need.

I hope you are on the mend all the time and that we hear from you here again. Peter.

Thanks, Peter. I do write, but never have attempted a novel. Perhaps I should...

I'm sure the reason you don't poach personal experiences for your material is simply because you have a richer imagination than mine. Fortunately, or unfortunately for me, I have had so many dramatic, tragic, funny, insane, or unbelievable experiences -- and family members with similarly horrific lives-- that imagination becomes virtually unnecessary, although I'd love to imagine how I could successfully write about my family and friends without having them all mad at me for publishing their private nightmares... or embarrassing moments.

I did write a plethora of plays with imaginary characters, so it isn't that I can't tax my brain a bit to come up with original material. It's just that the stuff that REALLY happens is so much more dramatic that anything I invent pales by comparison... except maybe for the most terrifying, recurring nightmares... and I don't want to try to beat Stephen King at horror writing.

I'm thinking I like you. My dreams are most of the time bizarre. I told my sister I could probably write a book like Stephen King. Why do I dream the way I do? Who knows. I have always had a wild imagination. My kids say I'm weird. What do they know? Lol. By the way, my computer is my bedmate too. And after 10 years of losing my rectum and anus, I still have problems sitting on my butt. Hey, and sometimes I even feel like it's still there. For real, like I get an itch but there's really nothing there to itch, not even the skin. Kookoo. And of course, scar tissue pain. Anyway, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, too, Golden Girl. It's good to have a few people thinking you're a little weird. Makes life interesting. If you can write like Stephen King, you should. It's been a very lucrative endeavor for him.

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