Anyhow, here I am, at long last ready to re-commence work on “Fallen Angel”, and what happens? A couple of gatecrashers take up residence in my head! That’s what happens!

There I was at work the other week, quietly minding my own business and eating my sandwiches, when out of no-where these two gatecrashers appear in my head. No introductions, no “Nice to meet you”, they just waltzed in there like they own the place!

Fortunately as it was lunch time everyone else was out of the office, because otherwise they’d have thought I was crazy. There I was, eating my coronation chicken sandwich and trying to update some records on the system without getting coronation chicken all over the keyboard, when these two muppets appear out of no-where, make themselves at home, and start up a conversation.

So there I am, in the middle off the office, thinking I must be going slightly crazy, because having two complete strangers wandering around in your head (only they’re not complete strangers because they’ve been wandering around there in the shadows for a while now and I’ve been trying to ignore them, but I digress) is not quite normal really.

By this time I’d given up any hope of trying to do any work, and fortunately I’d finished my sandwich. I ended up sitting with my head in my hands, with my hands over my ears, talking out loud to them. The conversation went something like this:

Me: PLEASE guys, keep it down will ya? I’m trying to work here!
Muppet #1: Huh? You talking to us?
Me: Well unless anyone else has taken up residence in my head, yeah, I’m talking to you!
Muppet #2: [whispers something to Muppet #1 who starts giggling]
Me: And you can cut that out too!
Muppet #1: Sorry, we’ll try and keep it down.

…I try to do some more work, and a few minutes later obviously I’ve become invisible again because now the conversation’s even louder and they’re laughing uproariously at something and I’m not in on the joke (though from the near empty bottle of whiskey at the side of them I’m guessing they’re drunk)…

Me: Guys!
Muppet #1: Sorry, we’ll [giggle] try and [uncontrollable laugher]
Me: Just come back tonight! I don’t care how late, but I NEED to get this finished, so just give me a break, huh?

Of course the end result is that they’re louder and more demanding than Kerry and Finn and co. and they’re demanding that I write about them first. Naturally Kerry and Finn and co. are none too impressed by this news, but when they’re real and they’re in your head, you just have to write about them (especially when they’ve rather conveniently mapped out the story and told you the ending). Finn just shrugs, but from Kerry I get one of those looks, the ones that proceed World War 3 starting up in my head. When Kerry gets pissed off the result isn’t pretty. The good news is that the gatecrashers aren’t asking for a full blown novel to be writen about them; they’re quite happy with a short story, which at least means that if I’m lucky I won’t have to endure Kerry sulking for too long.

Why do these characters suddenly take it upon themselves to invite themselves into my head? I have a theory, but I’ll save that one for another day. In the meantime I shall sellotape my eyes shut and stick some cotton wool in my ears tonight when I go to bed in the hope of stopping any more damned gatecrashers getting in while I’m not looking. It’s getting far too damned crowded in there!

Always up for a challenge, I thought I’d give it a shot. Summing up your life, your achievements, your outlook, thoughts, hopes and desires in only six words?

A number of quotes from some of my favourite films raced through my head…too long, too short, not me, not quite, not everything that is me. The same with some of my favourite song lyrics. And then it came to me! The tagline of this here place!

Living on the edge – looking in.

The explanation, taken from my ‘about me’ here on NeonBlue Dreams:

“Living on the edge”, as the tagline says, is what I do – living on the edge of what my body allows me to do, living on the edge of doing the sensible thing, living on the edge of the fictional world in my head and looking in, and living on the edge of sanity.

I live on the edge in a good way (at least the way I see it), and stubborn to the core I continue to live on the edge, and will do in every way for as long as I’m able. My balance on the edge is somewhat precarious at times, but I haven’t fallen off. Yet.

In October the pain clinic prescribed me buprenorphine pain relief patches – buprenorphine’s in the same family of drugs as morphine etc., and a controlled drug; ID required every time I go and pick up a prescription from the pharmacy. The omnipresent back pain I’ve had since forever due to the spina bifida occulta, and complicated now by having a lumbar peritoneal shunt rammed into my spine, and a curvature I developed in my teens, has recently been getting worse, and despite maximum doses of the various painkillers I’m prescribed, I was struggling with it. The patches have a number of benefits over the pills – you can’t forget to take them (though with the pills my body would remind me forcefully I was late in taking them if it got much past my usual time for taking them), you don’t have to wait a while for them to fully kick in, and you just change it a couple of times a week. It’s big drawback though is that the damned stuff knocks you out.

For the first few days I was using the patches I wandered around like a zombie, falling asleep at the drop of a hat. Gradually though I got used to them, and the falling asleep thing wasn’t so much of an issue, at least not all of the time, though it does still happen. I’ve been managing okay at work; I time my working hours around the times of day I’ve come to realise are my worst times for dozing off, and if I look as though I might be nodding off, one of my colleagues gives me a prod.

Recently though they’ve increased the dosage, but thankfully it didn’t have the same extreme effect as when I first started using the patches. I was a little more dopey than usual for the first few days after the increase, but that was all. Something weird’s been happening these last few days though because I’ve literally spent most of the last three days asleep. I suppose if I was sitting at the desk at the computer it wouldn’t happen so frequently, or at least I’d wake myself up because I’d bang my head on the keyboard or something, but lounging on the sofa in my little office as I have a habit of doing, snuggled amongst my squidgy cushions with the laptop, it’s all too easy to fall back and just drift off.

Wednesday I was supposed to be finishing an Open University assignment off. Wednesday morning started off well and I spent the morning joining in with a group discussion on the course forum, as directed by the course documentation, but it went downhill from there. Despite supposed to be working on the assignment questions, I dozed on and off for most of the afternoon. By tea-time I’d managed to write the grand total of two paragraphs, and even they didn’t make much sense. With mere hours to go before the clock ticked over towards the rapidly advancing Thursday deadline, I knew what Wednesday evening I’d got to pull my finger out and get stuck into it. So, after tea upstairs I headed again and settled down at the laptop to get stuck into it. The next thing I knew it was 10.30pm and I’d been asleep three hours. I eventually finished the assignment off at 2am.

Thursday was pretty much the same. I managed to get some course reading done while waiting at the anti-coagulation clinic, but my output for the rest of the day was the grand total of two emails written over a span of several hours interspersed with naps of varying lengths.

Friday I managed to get precisely bugger all useful done, again sleeping most of the day.

It’s scary because I can literally be in the middle of doing something, and suddenly I’m out cold. I’ve no recollection of feeling tired, or of dozing off, just waking up sometimes hours later with no idea what happened. I can fall asleep mid-way through typing a sentence, or mid-way through turning the computer off. I’ve posted messages on web forums over the past few days that I’ve no recollection of posting. If I close my eyes to think about something, or ponder where a sentence was going, my thoughts slip sideways into something completely different, and if I’m lucky I wake up a few minutes later wondering what the hell happened, otherwise, undisturbed, it can be hours later.

Then there’s the dreams. Now I don’t recall the list of side-effects of the patches listing “weird dreams” amongst it’s list of many side-effects. I do remember though that my grandma said when she was on oral morphine after she was diagnosed with bowel cancer that she had some very vivid and strange dreams. Vivid and strange they most definitely are. They tend to be those very vivid ones where everything’s so real and so detailed you could almost reach out and touch it, but you’re also totally aware at the same time that it’s only a dream.

I had one recently where I was at work, and every detail of my desk and everything was correct, but there were just two things that made it come under the “vivid and weird” category – one, where the door should have been was replaced by a clear perspex screen, and two, all the people I usually work with were on the other side of this perspex screen watching me while I painted everything in sight bright neon blue with a child’s small plastic paintbrush. Oh, and I was wearing a bright yellow sun dress with daffodils on it. A sun dress, in February?! I guess that one really was a “NeonBlue Dream”!

One of the most recent one was last night, which I blame entirely on reading some somewhat racy fiction on LiveJournal, and the fact that I’d been pondering my forthcoming clinic appointment next week with my neurosurgeon. And no, it wasn’t that kind of dream! You have to admit though that finding yourself in a doctor’s office not in the usual doctor on one side of the desk and patient on the other arrangement but laying with your head on the doctor’s lap while the said doctor strokes your hair and simultaneously plays the harmonica just a little, well, weird. I could I suppose explain the scene in the stuff I’d been reading that I think prompted this particular dream, but I think it’s more fun to leave you to wonder

Then there was the one earlier today in the course of writing this entry. Closed my eyes for a moment (hah!) to ponder where I was going with one particular sentence, and bam! The next thing I knew I was taking a friend’s motorbike for a test drive as said friend had recently passed away (huh? Last I heard from her she was still very much alive, and as far as I know she’s never owned a bike!). After taking the bike for a spin (I’ve only ever once been on a bike, and that was as a passenger, and it’s not an experience I’d care to repeat) I returned to her parent’s house (they were minding the bike) to tell them I would indeed take the bike off their hands, but in the course of walking down their driveway, it turned into another friend’s house, but I carried on down the driveway without skipping a beat.

Now a couple of things that the continuity guys in the dream department really need to know. Firstly, though I have to agree that motorbikes do look good, I am firmly of the belief that the damned things are death-traps waiting to happen, and I’ve never forgotten the story my grandad, who used to be an ambulance driver with extra training, the equivalent of the modern day paramedic, told me about the sticky ending a biker who’d met. Secondly, in the dream I was walking without the aid of any of my usual paraphernalia required for getting around. And lastly, as I have little balance, it usually takes a minimum of three wheels to get me around (pictured right, the model of my wheeled walker, the “Uniscan Triumph”, though mine’s unsurprisingly blue, and also has the optional shopping bag fitted as well). The continuity guys regularly get it wrong, but I put that down to the fact that my mind, at least when it’s freed of this damned body it’s trapped in, forgets it’s tethered to this here body, and plays games of “let’s suppose”. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing though, and it’s nice that the “dream me” gets to do things that the “real life me” can’t do.

So there we are. A flavour of some of the weirdness that’s been going on in my head recently.

On the positive side though, the buprenorphine induced dreams have got me back writing again. That and a combination of the fact that I’ve started reading again. As it was once said that my writing comes under the heading of “a bit weird”, buprenorphine fueled weirdness helps no end. Now I just need to stay awake long enough to be able to do something with this regained creativity. I’ve come up with something for the patches’ manufacturers though; a new tag line for their product…”kills pain – promotes creativity”

My maternal great grandfather donated himself to medical science (I guess it was a cheaper option than a funeral in those days), so I thought with a couple of rare-ish medical conditions, it would be interesting to find out how much my body might be worth to medical science…Cadaver Calculator: Find out how much your body is worth

$5140.00The Cadaver Calculator – Find out how much your body is worth.

$5140! The only question that remains now is whether I should cash it in now, or wait to see if it goes up with inflation?