Beam Me Up, Scotty

Our house has not been fun this week.

I am back to work today, since my fever finally subsided this morning. I guess that’s the good and the bad news.

Let’s talk about cold medicines though.

My family has always been supporters of NyQuil. As good as NyQuil is for making you sleep when you’re sick and taking care of all of those symptoms of the creeping cruds, for me it has one horrific side effect. It gives me nightmares.

I don’t just mean lochness kind of monster nightmares, but wake-up-screaming kind of nightmares. You do that for a few nights and you won’t take NyQuil anymore either.

I’ve switched to a comparable brand, Tylenol Cold and Flu. It’s the same kind of medicine, a multi-symptom cold relief. This at least won’t make me wake up screaming for mercy.

However, it does mess with my mind. Every night and during every nap, my mind has just gone wild with crazy thoughts. The dreams are so realistic that I even woke up scared half to death yesterday afternoon and I was crying.

I can’t remember all of them now, but some of the biggies include:

- Hiding in the attic of the house I grew up in. I’m not sure who I was hiding from or why, but I went through the door in the kitchen up to the attic and blocked the door back to the kitchen. I should have been safe there, but suddenly, almost all of the cousins I’ve grown up with (and now their families) had come looking for me up in the attic. I was going crazy, worrying about my hiding spot and then how did they get up there with the door blocked? I was told they all came up through the new stairway they put from the living room to the attic. What new stairway? My brother Jim in my dream was hiding in the attic with me and I started asking him about why didn’t he ever tell me they put a new stair way from the living room and he told me it was on a need to know basis and obviously, I didn’t need to know! Just like a brother, huh?

- I was working, but in a lobby of a big building, waiting for someone. I don’t know who I was waiting on, but I am assuming it was a client. The next thing I know, security comes and rousts me from the comfy chair in the lobby and manhandles me out of the lobby and into a freight elevator. They told me I was going to be sorry for not listening and being where I wasn’t supposed to be. I was being crushed into the corner of this freight elevator when suddenly the security goons left me, pushed a button and the entire floor of this elevator except for a tiny ledge all disappeared. Do you have any idea how afraid of heights I am? Here I am, barely standing on this ledge, and I’m told to stay there. Buddy, I ain’t moving anywhere! I start to shake, and all I can do is imagine falling through this elevator shaft. I start crying and pleading with them to explain what I did wrong and why were they doing this?

Ok, in hindsight (and the light of day) neither of these sounds so bad. But when you’re the one in the middle of the dream, it’s made one afraid to shut their eyes at night. And to think this is SO much better than the NyQuil!

Last night, I didn’t take any meds. I still feel like I’ve gone 10 rounds with Lennox Lewis and I didn’t sleep hardly a wink last night. But at least this morning the fever did finally break so I don’t need the meds any longer.

Damn, I’m getting too old to be sick; too old to dream.