TheDreamstersUnion

(Wednesday, Christmas Day, 2024) waning crescent moon Scorpio / tarot two of pentacles

I wake up early this morning and listen to a podcast about Ayurveda and the book “The Longevity Formula.” After I fall back to sleep, I experience sleep paralysis that is different than any I have had in my life. Large, colorful human heads fly past my vision, in deep blackness. The heads are brilliant, fluorescent lights in primary colors: blue, green, yellow, orange, red. I sense my paralysis and struggle for a while to return to normal sleep.

Day notes:

I worked on this dream with Victoria’s dream circle. Here are their new titles:
Lighting Up My Darkness
Accepting My Sleep Paralysis A Different Way
The Calm Over The Rainbow
The Wisdom Of The East
Loosen The Struggle For The Flow Of Space
Brilliant And Black
Heading East
Cosmic Christmas
Dream Information Doctors Can’t See
Illumination
Head Start
Over My Head
Somewhere Over The Rainbow

My titles:
Healing Rainbows
The Peaceful Universe
Universal Light

(Wednesday, December 18, 2024) waning gibbous moon Leo / tarot Lovers

I am in a bedroom in a building that feels like the Mayo Gonda tower. It is many stories high. A male friend, not a close friend, joins me in my single bed and tries to have sex with me, even though we are both fully dressed. This makes me deeply angry. I grab at his neck with my fingers and squeeze as hard as I can. I yell. I want to give him extreme pain. At first he ignores me, but I keep on physically attacking him with my hands, which starts to cause torment. He jumps off the bed and runs down the stairs. Following him, I find a heavy metallic office chair and grab it. I want to hit him in the head as hard as I can. He escapes.

I begin to move up the flight of stairs, to multiple stories. Some levels are newly, commercially decorated, full of workers. Beautiful, impressive. Some are old, neglected and empty. I meet a tall, handsome young man two stories above the bedroom. He tells me that he heard me yelling at the attacker. Eventually I finish my exploration of the skyscraper and head down the stairs. The main floor is very much like the “castles” I have been having in recent dreams.

Now I am outdoors, meeting with another friend, a woman. I tell her about the potential rape but she is not affected by my story, even though she also knows the predator. She is focused on taking a series of photographs in nature. Her eyes are on the camera viewfinder. I feel sad, alone.

Day notes:

I am feeling very depressed about my diagnosis. Feeling attacked by it. My Friday Zoom meeting is with a tall young man, my neurologist.

Plenty of Gonda spaces are newly updated and others are waiting for remodels.

This is a vivid, lucid dream but I did not write about enough of the images/events early enough in the day. Pieces are missing.

December 21 (Solstice): In my meeting with Dr. Pounders yesterday, he mentioned that at the end of dementia, personality can change and some become aggressive about sex. Chris’ mom had that symptom.

(Tuesday, December 17, 2024)

On the morning of my first trip to the Mayo Clinic (Friday the 13th), I have a short dream about the four edges of a wall I am painting (top, bottom, left, right), next to an open door (left). I touch the edges with my fingers and see/feel how they are randomly and poorly done. As if I have not even used a brush. They almost look like capillaries or nerves. So I grab my favorite two-inch brush and cover the incorrectly-applied paint with a nice, smooth layer of white. In the next fragment, I pick up a golden bike chain from the ground. It is tangled. I pull on it with my fingers to make the fix, to unlock the bound-up links. Freeing them for a safe ride.

Day notes:

Bicycle:
bi: two, twice
cycle: 1. repeating series of events, 2. long period of time, 3. a vehicle, 4. a set of poems or songs

Chain of events? The word cycle is similar to circle, and bike wheels are circular. This reminds me of my tarot reading about the Mayo with the Wheel of Fortune card symbolizing the past.

The Mayo Clinic was a tremendous experience. Buildings were filled with thousands of people, hundreds in wheelchairs. Everyone I met was incredibly kind and gifted at their profession. Beautiful artwork was mounted in many of the hallways, including over a dozen prints signed by Andy Warhol. I can still feel the historic, spiritual presence of the Mayo. My favorite experience was the two grand pianos being wonderfully played all day on Monday (December 16). I sat for hours in the Gonda building, waiting for my five appointments while listening to Christmas jingles and dramatic, modern melodies. One woman pianist had a gorgeous, high-octave singing voice. Another woman wore her blue nursing outfit, arriving at the piano bench in a wheelchair.

A discussion we had last month at Wisdom Ways with Dr. Paul from the Mayo included the large white element on the border (edge) of the brain, the CSF (cerebrospinal fluid).

Result this morning of my MRI:
Impression: Asymmetric left anterior temporal lobe volume loss, similar or minimally progressed since 4/3/2024. This can be seen with the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia.

At my Friday appointment with my neurologist, after the doctor said semantic dementia was the slowest in progression, I told him about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aphasia lasting twenty years. Saturday morning, before my second trip to Rochester, I got a full-moon email from neighbor astrologer Deb O’Connor, beginning with this quote from Emerson. I told her Waldo had had a stroke and aphasia, which she did not know:
To the dull mind, all nature is leaden.
To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
I like Waldo’s reference to fire, as that reminds me of the dream I shared at our last Dreamsters meeting. Synchronicity.

More MRI data:
Review of the quality control images demonstrates good segmentation of the hippocampi:
Left hippocampal volume: 2.94
Right hippocampal volume: 3.49
Hippocampal asymmetry index: -16.93
Combined hippocampal volume: 6.43
Combined hippocampal volume age-adjusted percentile: 30
Combined inferior lateral ventricles (temporal horns) volume: 3.01
Combined inferior lateral ventricles (temporal horns) age-adjusted percentile: 96

Patrick recently shared a dream with The Dreamsters Union that was about tangled gears in his bike.