Look. I’m a wreck from head to toe and it was already bad enough before I got sick. By my count I’ve had the flu four times since Christmas, or the same one with relapses, I can’t really tell. The fever, cough, diarrhea, headaches…. Running nose.
But lately the worst by far would be the runaway nightmares. Not quite like PTSD nightmares, yet the same except they’re jacked up on steroids and LSD. Because they are vile.
Do you ever dream about being chased or trapped? Of course you do. Almost everyone experiences those, maybe not regularly, but at times in their lives when they are most stressed, or feeling isolated. Beyond that thin requirement, no one really knows why our own minds torture us so.
In fact….No one even knows why or how we dream. It’s the Undiscovered Country. We still can’t figure out why we get sleepy and then sleep, although case histories have informed us that going too long without it can induce a myriad of horrifying symptoms, one of the worst being hallucinations. Go beyond that and the person simply dies. There is a specific disorder, Fatal Insomnia, and like the name says, you get it, you die.
That would be merciful next to PTSD nightmares which are augmented by fever, as I am finding out on my own. I do have insomnia and sleep apnea, a seemingly unlikely combination, yet it is so. And since Christmas, I don’t remember any nightmares being as fucking traumatic as those of the past week. They’ve been during deep sleep, however brief, and they’re some of the worst I’ve ever had.
I’ve talked about dreams before. In my post “Bolero Hats and Thunder” (see my archives) I described a particular nightmare that had prophetic elements to it. Oh, I lived to tell the tale. That’s not really all that good. The demon comes back.
Don’t start thinking I’m being hard on myself here or saying something controversial because I fancy myself some asshole who’s been through enough to know everything. I only have one reason I want attention. That is so you or someone you love never ends up like this. Early intervention with PTSD can ease some of the suffering. I recommend regular therapy whether single or in trauma groups by experts you must personally vet. I also recommend talking to your doctor about possibly taking certain medications and absolutely you must consider exercise and diet. See a dietician who can access your records, don’t rely on web sources and, whatever you do, please don’t buy snake oil from TV ads and infomercials. Those should be banned by the FCC. Nothing about them is proven. “Doctors” who endorse these fucking products are quacks. Remember what’s at stake here. Your mental health and your physical health are not separate things. This is your life we’re talking about.
I have no answers for PTSD dreams. The syndrome is an actual physical condition: post traumatic stress disorders cause multiple symptoms in people including eating disorders, panic episodes, flashbacks which can lead to a dissociative state of mind, resulting in the mental reliving of incidents that may have happened long ago (studies by hospital trauma teams have turned up a disturbing connection between PTSD and serious accidents in the workplace and on the highways because of “distraction” by episodes of dissociative states), nightmares and sleep disorders, coronary disorders including heart attack, blood pressure disorders, digestive system disorders including IBS and IBSD, severe depression and severe hypomania which resemble bipolar disorder but really aren’t, and behavioral changes of each end of the spectrum, notably a disinterest in sex or a promiscuous and risky hypersexual lifestyle. There’s more, but the combination of any of these are different in all subjects; no two people are alike.
Articles, books and papers by professionals have tried for at least a century to lay out what PTSD is and what causes it and how to cure it.
In ancient times warfare caused the same psychological effects as it does today. By the time of Alexander the Great, battlefields were strewn with bodies and body parts. Guts, brains, entrails filled the air with a stench any medic or close combat veteran or villager today knows and can never forget. The night would bring sieges of battlements by crude artillery, or it would fall silent except for the screaming and piteous cries of the dying. For some, one battle was enough. Others took longer. To even think PTSD wasn’t real is to overestimate humans then compared to now. What always happened was something recorded as far back as ancient Assyria. That’s not even considering what happened before. Hunters wounded in a violent battle in prehistory by a mammoth or an even worse animal trying to claim the kill would never be the same. It would not be called “PTSD” until late 1979 when Vietnam veterans were in- country one day, on a jet the next, arriving home in 48 hours. We can assume a little about veterans of earlier wars. Post-World War Two and Korean Conflict veterans were treated at Veterans hospitals stateside, and depending on their symptoms, kept for the rest of their lives or released. Others went straight home. One distinct difference between 1941-1945 and what followed is that returned soldiers could proudly wear their dress uniforms and be welcomed home by adoring crowds even in small towns. To some this and the travel time on a ship to the states could have been a help in transition. Buddies supported each other, some listening, some talking, but even with that, heroes always had problems. Artilleryman Frank Cunningham once had to take a Thompson or an M-1 Garand and charge a Nazi machine gun nest. The MG-42 was the heavy machine gun feared by allied infantry and artillery alike; it spat bullets at such a high rate that charging a position was considered suicide. The troops called it “the zipper” and there was rarely only one. A fixed gun in a bunker window was called a “murder hole”. The weapon had only one weakness: the assistant gunner had to change barrels because the rate of fire made them overheat. While the change and reload time could be fast, it did give infantry time to find better cover, or, in Frank’s case, time to get close and toss a grenade and eliminate the position. He was awarded a medal, one of several.
In a report I once read, the authors claimed that mild cases of PTSD cleared up on their own or with minimal professional treatment. I dismissed it out of hand then and I still do. MRI studies have shown that there are actual changes to the brain and they’re not just real, they’re permanent injuries. Some images show profound changes while others seem minimal, and yet no matter what, the subject suffers from the same range of symptoms. That means that a dramatic change has taken place which disrupts everything down to the interruption of neurotransmitters and how they are used by their receptors. That’s really tragic. Soldiers come home different. Storybook marriages end, sometimes messy, sometimes deadly. Victims of domestic abuse, from battered spouses to sexuality abused children lose who they were. In the case of protracted emotional and violent physical abuse accompanied by sexual abuse, the surviving child will, at the instant of the first abusive act, cease to develop normally. Development is arrested and a new child evolves and continues to do so in progressively dysfunctional ways long into adulthood, even after the brain has finished development, in the late 20s. This is due in part to learned behavior, which is collectively known as personality disorders, of which there are many elements within each that can combine to defy any certain disorder being named. The resultant diagnosis is “Personality Disorder, Unspecified”. And it’s damnably maddening to treat just it is for a patient to cope with even if he or she understands the mechanisms involved. Later I’ll put it differently: the symptoms of personality disorders and PTSD often appear to be the same.
IN YOUR DREAMS
When he came home, no one really noticed anything about him that seemed to stand out. Frank Cunningham married, had one child and never spoke of his experiences in Europe under Generals Bradley and Patton. A few times, he told his daughter a small story. She became a nurse and came to know he had to have nightmares and other problems. So strong was he that there was never anything again that he was afraid of. That’s also a symptomatic response to the hell he endured and witnessed. After a war, what is there to be afraid of? Once, as a political figure, he threatened infamous mobster Crazy Joe Gallo, the man who was suspected of taking part in the public hit of mob boss Albert Anastasia, head of the Anastasia crime family. Crazy Joe even hired a black hitman to assassinate Joe Colombo, the head of the former Profaci crime family, now the Colombo family, after Colombo drew undue attention with his pronounced activities in Italian-American civil rights, as they knew it was a scam he used to make money from donations while calling out the FBI for carrying out biased operations to target Italians as gangsters. Colombo was shot at a rally and paralyzed, and died 6 years and change later. Between these incidents, Crazy Joe once badly frightened a schoolgirl when she was going home from school. When Frank Cunningham heard of this, he waited for Joe Gallo. When next he saw the mobster, Cunningham somehow put the fear of God into the man. He was one of very few Crazy Joe ever backed away from. To put this into perspective, Joe Gallo was as evil and dangerous a man as any other gangster in the Mafia’s heyday. Being a rogue and having earned his mob sobriquet, he was a loose cannon, and as such, perhaps one of the most dangerous men in New York. Gallo was shot to death while dining in Little Italy in 1972. He went out shooting and bravely drawing fire to himself by charging to the front door to protect his family. Now picture a man who towered over him one day and made a man like Crazy Joe Gallo walk away. He never did fuck with a civilian in Cunningham’s considerable jurisdiction again.
That’s just one possible outcome of PTSD. You fear nothing. You’ll protect anyone no matter who threatens them.
Along the same line as fearlessness is something far worse and far more dangerous: daredevil, disinhibition, compulsive risk taking behaviour. The exact mechanisms for this are still being studied, but what we seem unable to agree on is that thrill seekers and professional daredevils have a different and opposite set of key instigators than risk takers. Complications of the argument are that dopamine and MAO are certainly involved. But what’s the difference?
Academically, I cannot say. I disagree with some conclusions based on my own experience. A thrill seeker can be labeled with a “personality type” which frankly I don’t have any patience for. I see them as people who like the rush of hazardous sports and activities, with personal injury avoided with skill gained by experience. Racing accidents, downhill skiing matches, cliff diving and extreme sports are never without casualties, but that is hardly anyone’s intent.
On the other hand the risk takers are without such concern, usually acting compulsively or impulsively; consequences and hazards are put on the periphery or completely disregarded. When still a fairly new driver, I loved driving fast. But I had neither the experience, and therefore skill set, to perform at high speed. I came very close to dying or killing someone else multiple times. It wasn’t as if I constantly drove insanely, but at times and under certain conditions, something came over me that I have never been able to describe. A warm summer evening, a good rock tune on the radio, girls watching from another car…. Who can tell? When the light turned green, I floored it. Nuts. Who can really tell me what the hell that was? Because I was fearless unless I saw the bright blue bubble gum machine on my bumper. I started to be more aware and made sure those 1977 Pontiacs were not in sight before letting whatever chemical that took over loose. Chased many times, but in a high speed chase, never caught. Why that was a point of pride shames me now but I didn’t care then. Oh, I didn’t want to be caught; the risk was the fun. I even lost choppers twice, and that’s almost impossible.
Along the way though, I racked up over 35 accidents, including totalling the same car three times. I know, I know. Sounds like bullshit. But it’s true. It was a ’93 Mazda 323, a tiny but tough car. Eventually I was just too scared, as my condition worsened, that I had beaten the odds for far too long. It wasn’t a question of if I would kill someone; it was a question of when I would.
But also, there were accidents when I wasn’t speeding, doing donuts, cornering or ruining tires by burning the rubber clean down to the steel belts and kicking up sparks in the night. The dissociation that hit me without warning also made me ram several cars in the rear. But the risky, uninhibited behavior wasn’t limited to driving. It fueled my sex life, it egged me into dangerous situations and I never seemed to learn my lesson.
Be careful; taking risks, mood swings and serious depression, feelings of being worthless, suicidal thoughts, dysfunctional relationship history and other symptoms of behavior can be diagnosed mistakenly as borderline personality disorder, or BPD. You have to be clear when consulting a doctor. The overall behavior involved with PTSD can closely resemble BPD. The problem is how you proceed with treatment and the incredible stigma of BPD as compared to PTSD. People who are diagnosed with BPD are shunned very often. Although the disorder is treatable and has been observed to ease with age while PTSD does not, word searches for it have sad questions. People ask if a BPD patient is dangerous, is sociopathic, lies constantly or if they’re even capable of love.
Any person is potentially dangerous, and there’s no use in denying it. How many times have you seen a reporter stick a microphone in some shocked person’s face after a neighbor shot and killed someone? Know what they say? “He was always so pleasant. He’d do anything for anyone.”
There’s no stone engraved that says only certain types of people can kill. Nothing, by the same playbook, says that a person with PTSD can’t perform a job, raise a family, be a good mother or father. In fact, people prove it every day. The same is true of schizophrenics, behavior disorder patients, those with OCD, autism and everything else. What remains to be solved and mitigated are the dark dreams of the sufferers of trauma.
We know so little of the brain and dreams, that nightmares are bound to be, as you’ve probably found out yourself, a mystery. Some sources claim a difference between stages of sleep and dream intensity. Some still cling to old school beliefs that people don’t dream except in the REM state, although we know by now that every stage of sleep can produce dreams. The data show several periods of dream sleep during a normal night, with dreams lasting seconds to perhaps even an hour. During the deepest sleep if a nightmare occurs, and people are awakened suddenly, sleep paralysis, that warm place which coming fully awake from is a long and frightful struggle, keeps one from moving or speaking. Experiences tell us of a history of”old hag attacks” during this time, when people feel a “weight on their chest” and see some witch or ancient demon sitting astride them. That would be fine if sleep paralysis alone could account for it, but it doesn’t even come close. The reason: a large amount of literature on the subject contradicts it completely. Not that sleep paralysis isn’t real. But cases go back as far as ancient history of other people witnessing the hag attacking someone else who was sleeping while the witness was awake. Last year I heard a first-hand account of such a case. A mother and daughter sharing a studio apartment: the mother, apparently unaware, slept. The daughter awoke suddenly and saw a hag attacking her mother. She of course woke her mother up and the hag vanished. What’s even more frightening is that the daughter swore adamantly that the “hag” was sucking energy from the mother’s mouth into its own mouth. Steeped in folkloric horror stories, this unfortunately seems quite likely to be very true. It explains why victims wake to feel weight on their chest and trouble breathing. Indeed, the realm of sleep is one of both delight and suffering. It also accounts for six to eight hours of sleep leaving one feeling sick and weakly lethargic.
AUGMENTED NIGHTMARES
There are many things that can cause nightmares to become so severe that they are actually traumatic in their own way. Factors such as health, diet, drugs (OTC, prescription and illicit), smoking, increased stress during the day’s work routine, the deterioration of a relationship, having a loved one gravely ill, financial situation and others all seem to play a part, like extras on a film set. You may not notice them, but they affect the quality of a film nonetheless. For a silly example, I give you Jurassic Park 2: “The Lost World”. It was a silly movie from the beginning to the end, but some of it had sillier moments than others. The extras made for some of the most hilarious bits, like when the T-REX was chasing its infant, carried in the back seat of a convertible by Ian Malcolm. On a street scene, some Japanese tourists are running away, in a tip of the hat to classic Godzilla movies. It’s so quick that if you blink you’re going to miss it. But all things considered, bit players are not so trivial after all.
Of all the bit players when it comes to PTSD nightmares, one of the most powerful is a low-grade fever. You don’t need much, but a fever tends to strengthen at night. When I’ve dreamt this last week, the result was always so bad that my attempts to stay hydrated during the day ended up with something getting drenched in urine during deep, dreadful dreams I couldn’t escape.
I don’t mind telling you this. These are things rarely addressed openly except for the distilled and impersonal websites that range from reliable information to medical myths. The internet is a digital minefield.
WHAT YOU DREAM MAY HAVE SIGNIFICANT MEANING OR NONE AT ALL, DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU READ
I’m a believer that for every nightmare, there are infinite possible reasons, and none are simple. If I agree that the human brain is still the real Undiscovered Country, then dreams are important. They do carry significant meaning, no matter what experts want to fight about. Leaving their quarrels behind is easy for me; I know that ultimately, they tangle so because they don’t know.
LABYRINTHINE TRAPS: RECURRING
My first nightmare of the week was memorable. Influenced no doubt because I fell asleep watching TV, and was surrounded by electronic devices which affect the level of ambient electromagnetic energy (which is claimed by various studies to affect the brain), I found myself with Rachel Maddow in some sort of after hours setting. She was a really funny, charming and somewhat eccentric. Or she’d had a few drinks. We were alone for a second and she was dressed in her normal suit. Then the fever and my PTSD kicked in and ruined my brief time with someone I admire.
She suddenly had guests and she was kicking back. Somehow she had long hair and let it down. She got wild, and began showing strangers large flip cards which morphed into gifs with sexual acts. Different kinds, all graphic. Then she turned into a full figured blonde who was evil and menacing. She chased me, and the building was old, very old, with once stained wainscoting and hardwood floors, all now gone to seed; scuffed and dust-covered. The hallways stank of old urine long ago soaked forever into the hardwood by pets. In a building with no air conditioning. I was running, trying to escape her. To escape it. This place was a true labyrinth, dark, dusty, no way out, one hallway turning a corner and leading to another. I never got out, but toward the end, the corridors shortened, there was little room to move, and yet several doors lined the dim scene. I knew that none would lead to freedom.
Of course, I awoke with wet crotch to find that the second airing, which begins at midnight eastern time, was halfway through. Rachel Maddow was calmly interviewing a guest. I turned the fucking TV off and went to the kitchen to kill the fever. A combination of one Alka Seltzer tablet in half a glass of water chased two Extra Strength Tylenol. Fuck a fever, I thought. Fuck Rachel Maddow too. I’m never watching her again unless I have a pot of caffeine-loaded Starbucks Veranda brewing. No offense, Rachel, mon ami.
Two nights later, weary from the constant coughing that had my intercostal muscles either sore or excruciating, depending on whether they were upper or lower, and again with a fever that rose as the sun set, I fought sleep. I drank coffee and took Tylenol. You think it helped, right? Cause you really want this post over already, don’t you?
No. It didn’t work out that way. Never does, for assholes. Why on Earth would you have imagined otherwise? Did you forget whose site you’re on? Shame, shame on you.
And this time it was even more terrifying than the first. A long time ago I had a 1970 Mustang Mach One. It was white with black GT stripes. I was traveling, not in the past, but some weird-ass future, a road somewhere in Columbia, when it turned suddenly into a dirt track with steep earthen sides, a deep cut into the ground, if you will. I got out to search on foot for the way out, as one wasn’t visible and had to be hidden in the repeated colors of piles and cliffs of clay and dirt. I knew I had passed a yellow diamond caution sign but the symbols on it made no sense. Why had the road stopped? Why had I continued to follow the way forward into a trench? What the hell was this, anyway? Was some tunnel being built? That made no sense; but I found myself climbing a less steep part of the trench’s side and was horrified. Huge “Safety Yellow” construction equipment worked at digging and moving dirt and typical Maryland clay. Menacing things, more than double the size of anything I’ve ever seen. At the top I also saw that so much dirt had been excavated that towering piles of it like mountains prevented me from seeing the way out. I slid down to return to my car and a guy in a hardhat said it was gone. I looked back to where I had left it and it was gone. Looking around I could see part of the right side under a new steep pile of dirt. The hardhat dude handed me a large manilla envelope and a red file folder and said to file a claim later, but for now get out of the area.
This began a frantic flight to freedom. First I found a shack for the construction company, entered it and found secretaries at desks like they were in a corporate building. What the fuck! Scared, but refusing to panic, I followed their directions through a door. I kept coming to places that got lighter over time, with a few windows to see the sunshine I had not seen at the beginning.
How long it all went on, I don’t know. Buildings seemed to connect through a single unmarked door. The doors gave way to new carpeted hallways and large spaces ranging from sparsely furnished and deserted to a doctor’s waiting room with sick children, all unaccompanied by adults. I got the hell out of there by asking a receptionist which of the many doors led to the street. I used the one she lazily pointed to as if she had to answer the question every day.
It went on and on. At one point I became aware that I was coming awake but I went right back to it. The next large space I found had a tall ceiling, full of big windows. The doors were big, leading out to wide, concrete steps and a concourse to a courtyard. All ultra modern, very pretty, but a dead end for me. I found that it was enclosed by tall stone walls with planters on top with ornate trees. I was able to hear traffic close by, but there was no way to scale the walls. They were at least a dozen feet tall.
I finally saw a highway through one section of a building but there was no exit. Two Russian women cursed me and said I was never leaving.
EVEN WORSE
Last night was a real ordeal. Fighting like hell to stay awake was useless. Somehow I found myself in a hybrid version of my childhood house in Pasadena and the worst house I ever lived in and still have nightmares about despite its demolition in early 2005. Parts of it were dirty and old, I found myself cramped onto a cot in a small modified section next to my older sister. For all intents and purposes we are enemies and have not spoken since summer, 1988. In the dream, we were close. A long time had passed and we were older. Our parents, now long dead, could be heard downstairs. Hurling curses and insults at both of us. My sister had a boyfriend but he turned out to be a real turd and left her. We were both desperate to escape the house. I climbed down an unfinished addition being built and I think I was scouting places to go for refuge. I’d seen the houses in real life but not since the 1970s because they’re in Greensboro, NC. But we weren’t there. We were in Pasadena.
Coming back with no ideas, I hugged my sister and cried. It looked like escape meant running with no place to go. I didn’t want that for her. But then it got really twisted. For comfort we became closer over time. Not in a good way, but not exactly crossing a line. One night I saw her getting dressed and holy shit, she had a penis!
What the hell? She’d managed to have a kid while being a hermaphrodite?
This wasn’t my sister! I knew who it was but there was no time to even cope. My parents were sex offenders but had passed some test and qualified to house orphaned children. They began taking up spaces until I had no choice but to leave. I frantically packed what I could in a backpack, but as the children settled in, they began to attack each other with extreme violence, including sexual assault and flesh eating. Before I could escape, I awoke, once again wet of crotch and deeply troubled. The sound of blood gushing through arteries filled my ears even as I gave up trying to forget my horror and revulsion. I took a half milligram of Klonopin, drank coffee, having washed and changed into my day clothes.
Interestingly I had not fallen asleep with the TV on. The power to everything was off. And chillingly, I awoke at the stroke of three, same as the night before: the third hour, the hour of shadows, or demons.
I have had evil spirits haunt my dreams and torment me many times. These experiences are not to be trivialized; they can do damage science denies. Have you ever heard of someone who died of a heart attack in their sleep and someone invariably says, “At least he didn’t suffer”?
How do they know that? If needing to find a restroom in a dream (as happened in the three dreams I’ve described) ends in either waking up a wet mess or making it to the bathroom in time and pissing for ten minutes straight, then demonic and torturous nightmares can certainly trigger a heart attack.
It’s a matter of contention, but the ancient Hebrews believed that nocturnal emissions (ejaculation during sleep) was a grave sin. Even the old testament relates the unlikely tale of a bride of several husbands who refused to impregnate the woman, “spilling their seed on the bed” or, in modern lexicon, “pulling out” instead. So God killed them.
So prevalent this belief in sin seemed that some scholars claim that the demonic succubus was invented. This was a female demon which sexually assaulted men in their sleep, thus accounting for the mess they awoke in.
Really? Like, everyone else automatically knew that a guy in their tribe or camp had a wet dream? Well, according to some interpretations of the law, he had to confess to it, and a succubus became the perfect reason to let him off the hook. Not being an expert on ancient Hebrews or their laws, I take the tale as true simply because incubi and succubi really do date far back to ancient times.
Then again, so do satyrs. The fact remains: there’s still so much we don’t know about the brain and the weird things it does. I’m so often amazed at what humanity has accomplished in the relatively short history it’s had on Earth. Pyramids that morons still claim humans could not have built, and therefore were erected by extraterrestrials. Angkor Wat, an enormous city surrounded by the largest religious structure ever built. So many wondrous things we as humans have done. Leaps in disease diagnosis and treatment, machines that can detect damaged areas of the brain, caused by great psychological trauma. We’ve sent men to the moon despite legions of idiots who say it was all faked by Hollywood.
Yet myths and false and dated beliefs are not going away anytime soon. We still don’t know why we dream. We guess. We do sleep study after sleep study. We can treat mental illness but not cure it. We can’t even cure the worst sleep disorder in existence.
All we can really know is what we experience and share. Eventually, who knows what we’ll find? Knowledge doesn’t come easily and usually not very quickly. We search. We learn from small clues.
All I know is this: mental illness sucks. PTSD sucks. Nightmares suck. Fevers suck. And PTSD nightmares combined with a fever?
Absolutely dreadful.
With the coronavirus spreading, let’s take a moment to remember that if you’re experiencing fever, you’re going to have your dreams change to black and terror-filled shit that no one should have to endure.
Memoirs of an American Asshole 