Effexor sleep effects
27 Sep 2010 06:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneWow, that was a seriously freakishly vivid dream. I used to have alarmingly vivid dreams in which nothing really happened (like dreams where I spaced out while wading into a pond or making a sandwich and when I woke up the only think I could really remember was the sandwich-making part), but it's like Effexor speeds my sleep cycle. I wake up countless times during the night and then fall back to sleep pretty effortlessly again. This is the first time I've noticed the effect on dreams though:
In the dream I came partly awake, enough to realize that it didn't make sense and I wasn't controlling my surroundings, but I didn't know that I was asleep. I thought I was in a computer program. (Obviously a sophisticated VR program, too.)
At the start of the dream, I was in a house with some other people when the television came on and the four children from the Narnia movies climbed into it as if they were 3-D projections. We knew they were an advertisement for a participatory game based on the books, so we climbed into the TV after them. The tasks themselves were puzzles to solve and things to climb over, set up in a series of rooms, but you had to do them all in order. (It was like you were physically there - no special fade effects or anything.) At this point the people around me were my friends from high school (but I was only aware of the ones I actually liked). Me and my friends from high school got funneled as a group into a big auditorium where teams were set up like a quiz bowl answering Biblical trivia questions and suddenly my childhood best friend showed up to talk strategy. She said she'd been stuck in this room until she ran out of time and had to go home so many times that she'd never got to see the second level at all. (To bear out her statement, the other teams in the room had been there for hours and there was a self-serve buffet lunch of spaghetti, salad, and donuts filled with Japanese bean curd.) (I criticized the quality of the spaghetti and got told to shut up and stop complaining by a cute little black dude that I knew from the high school band in 9th grade.) My friends and I snuck out of the room prematurely, into the lobby area leading to the giftshop, and discovered that we had turned into my childhood girl scout troop and the whole game was an attraction at the Huntsville Space Center theme park and our troop leader Mrs. Brown was there with donuts. While eating donuts, I mentioned the conversation about the second level and Mrs. Brown, true to character, encouraged us to sneak in since lack of time shouldn't keep us out when we had paid.
The second level started with video games, and because I was so bad at them I quickly lost track of my friends at the part where the holographic projections of horses raced through the room and you were supposed to grab one and jump on and let it take you into the next level by failing to try to grab mine. It left without me, and I washed up among the guys my friends and I were mostly too cool for in high school, including The Guy Who Liked Metallica and The State Chess Champion. I watched them practice shooting with ray guns until they got bored and, having missed the horses too, decided to go through the doors on foot. I went with them. It was kind of boring and the other holograms didn't turn on; we were just walking down a white-painted hallway and a slope and so on, occasionally decorated with giant bouncy balls, until the horse part apparently ended and we got to a long twisty slide that you were supposed to ride down in miniature cars with working gas and brakes. We got shoved in the end of a group of strangers, and I was at the end, irrationally anxious about driving a toy car even though I'm quite a good driver of real ones. I got lost in the curves and my car vanished and I ended up crawling through the twisty slide alone until it widened into a round, plastic tunnel and my dog Perry crawled up to my followed by a camp counselor guy. He looked at me suspiciously until I explained that Perry was my actual dog from the physical world and must have recognized me, and then he shrugged and crawled on his way, leaving us alone. I crawled onwards until I came to some double swinging doors and, figuring it would be time to seek out my Girl Scout Troop leader again, got up and left. Perry vanished.
I was in a big, empty parking lot, not at the Space Center at all and no Girl Scouts or anyone else in sight. It was glaringly hot and sunny like the middle of summer. I started walking towards the nearest median island for some shade and then I saw Wax running towards me. We grabbed each other with cries of "Baby!" "Baby!" and started discussing where we were. "I was expecting this to be the Huntsville Space Center." "I don't know where the car is." "It's really hot out here." So we decided to go inside when I pointed out the doors, and she followed me back to them. We went inside and found ourselves in the basement level of a hospital, complete with white ceramic tile walls, directional signs, and aura of sterility. We could hear all the hospital noises but were for the moment alone in the corridor, until we walked past a big door with a metal plate on it that said 2003.
At that point Wax said "2003? Well it must be at least 2006."
I turned to her in horror. "What? In the real world it's 2010! We got married last year!"
She just looked at me blankly. She was wearing a pale blue tshirt and I said "We only bought this t-shirt last summer! And you're wearing your newest pair of glasses - you didn't even have them in 2006. You've lost weight since then! And your earring -" and then I noticed she only had one hole pierced in her ear for some reason, and then I freaked out and yelled, "And where is the stud in your eyebrow and the ring in your other eyebrow?" (She doesn't have piercings in her eyebrows. She does, however, have two holes in one ear and one in the other, which seems to be what my brain was groping for.)
"Baby," she said with a Waxy air of tolerant amusement, "I don't know about that."
"But you've got to be really Wax! Please say you're the real Wax!" I cried in sudden panic, seizing her shoulders.
She said, "I'm a projection -" and made a smirk that Wax never makes. It filled me with such visceral horror that I flew into a panicked rage at her for impersonating real Wax.
"You're not a projection! You're part of a video game that thinks it's at the Huntsville Space Center, but that's not even true!" I screamed. I picked up the projection of Wax by the shoulders and discovered that it weighed nothing. I turned it 90° in the air and it just went. I twisted, and it balled up like a piece of metallic paper. Suddenly the hospital was gone; I was standing beside a giant fountain, and I flung it into the water. "I got here by climbing into a television! You're nothing but a program! A program that contains--"
By this point I had gathered so much steam that in the dream I was hoarse. And I woke myself up when I heard myself say "contains" actually out loud. (Not a scream though, just... a hoarse mumble.)
Suddenly I was wide awake, staring at the ceiling like @_@, freaked the fuck out, and remembering the whole dream. I lay there, cartoonishly wide awake yet not yet aware enough to command my limbs to move, until I realized... one of my hands was still balled into a fist where I'd grabbed Wax's shoulder with it. The other hand was bent up and I was touching my own eyebrow with just two fingers where I'd touched Wax's face looking for the imaginary piercing.
...and then I stumbled out of bed to write it down.
In the dream I came partly awake, enough to realize that it didn't make sense and I wasn't controlling my surroundings, but I didn't know that I was asleep. I thought I was in a computer program. (Obviously a sophisticated VR program, too.)
At the start of the dream, I was in a house with some other people when the television came on and the four children from the Narnia movies climbed into it as if they were 3-D projections. We knew they were an advertisement for a participatory game based on the books, so we climbed into the TV after them. The tasks themselves were puzzles to solve and things to climb over, set up in a series of rooms, but you had to do them all in order. (It was like you were physically there - no special fade effects or anything.) At this point the people around me were my friends from high school (but I was only aware of the ones I actually liked). Me and my friends from high school got funneled as a group into a big auditorium where teams were set up like a quiz bowl answering Biblical trivia questions and suddenly my childhood best friend showed up to talk strategy. She said she'd been stuck in this room until she ran out of time and had to go home so many times that she'd never got to see the second level at all. (To bear out her statement, the other teams in the room had been there for hours and there was a self-serve buffet lunch of spaghetti, salad, and donuts filled with Japanese bean curd.) (I criticized the quality of the spaghetti and got told to shut up and stop complaining by a cute little black dude that I knew from the high school band in 9th grade.) My friends and I snuck out of the room prematurely, into the lobby area leading to the giftshop, and discovered that we had turned into my childhood girl scout troop and the whole game was an attraction at the Huntsville Space Center theme park and our troop leader Mrs. Brown was there with donuts. While eating donuts, I mentioned the conversation about the second level and Mrs. Brown, true to character, encouraged us to sneak in since lack of time shouldn't keep us out when we had paid.
The second level started with video games, and because I was so bad at them I quickly lost track of my friends at the part where the holographic projections of horses raced through the room and you were supposed to grab one and jump on and let it take you into the next level by failing to try to grab mine. It left without me, and I washed up among the guys my friends and I were mostly too cool for in high school, including The Guy Who Liked Metallica and The State Chess Champion. I watched them practice shooting with ray guns until they got bored and, having missed the horses too, decided to go through the doors on foot. I went with them. It was kind of boring and the other holograms didn't turn on; we were just walking down a white-painted hallway and a slope and so on, occasionally decorated with giant bouncy balls, until the horse part apparently ended and we got to a long twisty slide that you were supposed to ride down in miniature cars with working gas and brakes. We got shoved in the end of a group of strangers, and I was at the end, irrationally anxious about driving a toy car even though I'm quite a good driver of real ones. I got lost in the curves and my car vanished and I ended up crawling through the twisty slide alone until it widened into a round, plastic tunnel and my dog Perry crawled up to my followed by a camp counselor guy. He looked at me suspiciously until I explained that Perry was my actual dog from the physical world and must have recognized me, and then he shrugged and crawled on his way, leaving us alone. I crawled onwards until I came to some double swinging doors and, figuring it would be time to seek out my Girl Scout Troop leader again, got up and left. Perry vanished.
I was in a big, empty parking lot, not at the Space Center at all and no Girl Scouts or anyone else in sight. It was glaringly hot and sunny like the middle of summer. I started walking towards the nearest median island for some shade and then I saw Wax running towards me. We grabbed each other with cries of "Baby!" "Baby!" and started discussing where we were. "I was expecting this to be the Huntsville Space Center." "I don't know where the car is." "It's really hot out here." So we decided to go inside when I pointed out the doors, and she followed me back to them. We went inside and found ourselves in the basement level of a hospital, complete with white ceramic tile walls, directional signs, and aura of sterility. We could hear all the hospital noises but were for the moment alone in the corridor, until we walked past a big door with a metal plate on it that said 2003.
At that point Wax said "2003? Well it must be at least 2006."
I turned to her in horror. "What? In the real world it's 2010! We got married last year!"
She just looked at me blankly. She was wearing a pale blue tshirt and I said "We only bought this t-shirt last summer! And you're wearing your newest pair of glasses - you didn't even have them in 2006. You've lost weight since then! And your earring -" and then I noticed she only had one hole pierced in her ear for some reason, and then I freaked out and yelled, "And where is the stud in your eyebrow and the ring in your other eyebrow?" (She doesn't have piercings in her eyebrows. She does, however, have two holes in one ear and one in the other, which seems to be what my brain was groping for.)
"Baby," she said with a Waxy air of tolerant amusement, "I don't know about that."
"But you've got to be really Wax! Please say you're the real Wax!" I cried in sudden panic, seizing her shoulders.
She said, "I'm a projection -" and made a smirk that Wax never makes. It filled me with such visceral horror that I flew into a panicked rage at her for impersonating real Wax.
"You're not a projection! You're part of a video game that thinks it's at the Huntsville Space Center, but that's not even true!" I screamed. I picked up the projection of Wax by the shoulders and discovered that it weighed nothing. I turned it 90° in the air and it just went. I twisted, and it balled up like a piece of metallic paper. Suddenly the hospital was gone; I was standing beside a giant fountain, and I flung it into the water. "I got here by climbing into a television! You're nothing but a program! A program that contains--"
By this point I had gathered so much steam that in the dream I was hoarse. And I woke myself up when I heard myself say "contains" actually out loud. (Not a scream though, just... a hoarse mumble.)
Suddenly I was wide awake, staring at the ceiling like @_@, freaked the fuck out, and remembering the whole dream. I lay there, cartoonishly wide awake yet not yet aware enough to command my limbs to move, until I realized... one of my hands was still balled into a fist where I'd grabbed Wax's shoulder with it. The other hand was bent up and I was touching my own eyebrow with just two fingers where I'd touched Wax's face looking for the imaginary piercing.
...and then I stumbled out of bed to write it down.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 27 Sep 2010 11:41 pm (UTC)That would have driven me straight into a screaming fit.
(no subject)
Date: 28 Sep 2010 08:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 28 Sep 2010 05:15 pm (UTC)http://www.journalfen.net/community/unfunny_fandom/700.html
Amazing racefail and publishing wank, complete with Amazon.com sockpuppets! I haven't laughed so hard since the golden days of FW.
(no subject)
Date: 28 Sep 2010 06:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 28 Sep 2010 07:25 pm (UTC)