Reset my mind

We had to euthanize our sweet greyhound girl this week.  I knew it was coming because she had kidney and heart disease.  We bought her a lot of time with trips to the veterinary hospital for fluids and medicines.  But eventually, the kidney failure was too much for her. We are both sad that she is gone but know that it was time.

I have been having a lot of flashbacks to childhood.  These are not dreams but happen when I am not highly focused on something. All of a sudden, there will be a vision of me standing in front of a bookcase in the old elementary school library, or me running down the dirt path leading to my cousin's house, or sitting on the stairs at my parents house looking out into the large front yard.

So many of these vivid flashbacks are occurring that I am wondering what it is about.  I have read that these can be caused by unresolved anxiety, or some form of PTSD.  But these aren't unpleasant memories at all--just very vivid and in great detail. I certainly would choose to be in the present and not have all of these thoughts about the past coming up and rushing through my head.  I asked my wife about it, and she said that she has dreams but hasn't experienced the vivid flashbacks that I am having while awake.

Sometimes I do wonder if I may not have inherited some of my family's tendency towards depression.  I hope not because it was a very hard road for both my mother and her father.  And it isn't any journey that I want to go on.

So I am going to stay in the moment by going on the boat this week. The weather is going to be cool.  It seems to reset my mind to go on the boat.  Right now, I am needing a reset for sure.

Sharing some photos of my greyhound girl when she was healthy and could run like the wind. I miss her a lot.

Drunk dreams

I awoke from a terrible dream this morning that my wife had started drinking again.  I was re-living in the dream the nightmare of being with her at a concert where she was drunk and stumbling.

These dreams are not new.  The venue may change but the recurring theme is that we are to meet somewhere, but I can't find her.  When I do find her, she is drunk. The dreams are vivid and realistic.  Fortunately, this is the first such dream that I have had in a long time.

I've read that dreams about something traumatic are common among those who suffer from PTSD.  A therapist once told me that she thought that is what I had from all the years of being around alcoholics.  I don't know whether that is true or not.  I have often been baffled by my dreams though.  The ones that I remember the most are troubling and leave me with a feeling of fear and great anxiety when I awake.

I wonder if the events of the past are encrypted in the neural pathways of my brain to such an extent that no amount of recovery will erase them.  Maybe not.  I have found in recovery a way to understand the nature of my anxiety around alcoholism.  But there are still unresolved aspects that no doubt spill over into dreams.  Yesterday, I was meeting with a fellow I sponsor who is doing his fourth step (a searching and fearless moral inventory of self).  He brought up his feelings of guilt and shame towards his parents and brother.  Some pretty stark and ugly emotions are discussed in the process of recovery.  Maybe those emotions in the unconscious mind spill over into the dream world as a reminder of what I have experienced.  Maybe there is something that I can learn from these dreams.

What I realize after waking from the "trauma" of a drunk dream is that:

• Drunk dreams are not unusual for either an alcoholic or a person affected by someone else's alcoholism
• Drunk dreams aren't reality but a recycling of something from the past.
• These dreams are a part of processing emotions.
• I can use the dreams as tools for self-discovery and spiritual progress.

Here are some more thoughts on the power and purpose of dreams from Gayle Greene, Ph.D. :

When people are awakened out of REM and given a word to associate to, their associations are more novel, more original than in other stages of sleep; they "ignore the obvious and put together things that make a kind of crazy unexpected kind of sense." Dreams..... are where we bring things together in fresh, often startling ways, drawing on stores of knowledge from the past, the present, the possible, to find new associations. Dreams may help us find new patterns and create combinations that break through well-worn ruts. 

I swear, I write better when I awake out of one of those intense, thrashing-it-through dreams. Even a troubling dream, a dream that churns up stuff I'd rather shove under the carpet, even a dream barely remembered, much less understood, seems to provide some kind of fluency, dream energy, fuel for thought. Those are the days that the words and images come, tumble out so fast that my fingers on the keys can barely keep up. I don't know how it works, but it does seem to work. 

And creativity isn't just for writers or artists, it's about basic survival, about finding new paths, figuring out what to do when something goes drastically wrong on the highway, in a marriage, in a work situation. We live in a complex world. We need our brains to be firing on all cylinders; we need to think creatively, flexibly, as we negotiate relationships with colleagues, co-workers, family, friends.

Much food for thought.  I know that the visions of that dream are still in my head. Maybe by putting these thoughts down,  I have a better understanding that what was once a reality for me has been transformed into a new awareness in recovery.

Heart sounds

I have had this annoying fluttering in my chest lately.  I know that these are heart palpitations.  I used to have these when I drank caffeine.  But over the last several years, I quit drinking caffeinated beverages of any kind.  So I think that this newest bout of heart flutters may be related to stress.

I suppose that I have had a few things to be stressed about over the past several months.  I definitely have been on edge a bit more lately because some of the people around me are having difficulties.  That being said,  I take care of myself by eating right, exercising, and relaxing.  I am not overweight, don't smoke, and seldom even have a beer.  But I have an active and inquisitive mind.  And I am the product of a life of living with alcoholism.  I suppose though that just having issues on the mind can cause a certain amount of stress. Some of those issues seem to not be immediately resolvable by me, so I have no need to spend time thinking about solutions.  I know all these things intuitively, yet the feeling of a shoe getting ready to drop continues.

I am going to see the cardiologist that I went to before when I had those heart sounds that he thought were nothing to worry about.  He suggested that I stop the caffeine.  I wonder what he will say this time: "Stop this life of feeling responsible. Get rid of the stress." Yes, I am doing what I can on that. 

I am going to take it easy today.  I have a meeting tonight.  I did sleep at home last night in my own comfortable bed.  I realize that I can't divest my life of all stress.  These are stressful times. And I have to deal with what comes my way.  But the heart fluttering is a reminder that I may not be letting things go as readily as I thought.  I have a residual feeling of anxiety that seems to have wormed its way into my psyche.  I want my heart sounds to be strong. I want to be kind to myself and not take on the weight of the world.

What a dream I had

I had another of the anxiety dreams about alcohol last night.  It was about my father.  He has now been dead for over 25 years.  And yet, there are times that he comes back to visit me.  Seldom are these dreams happy.  That makes me sad because I know that he was such a good person.  It seems unfair that he only comes to me through these dreams that are unsettling. 

The dream last night was one in which he had stayed away for days.  My mother and I presumed that he was drinking.  He never did this in reality.  He would simply sip his bourbon on his days off, starting about 10 AM and be fairly drunk by dinner.  Then he would go to bed.  He was not a binge black out drunk.  Yet, in this dream, he is gone, and we are dreading his return. 

I tell my mother that it is time that she left him.  I suggest that she sell the house and move someplace else.  These dreams are so unsettling because my parents were married for over 50 years at the time of his death.  I don't think my mother ever thought about leaving my father who eventually quit drinking altogether as he got into his 60's.  But in this dream, she thinks that it is the best idea. She will sell everything and move away.

I know that these dreams are my anxieties surfacing.  They leave me feeling unsettled and disoriented when I awake.  But then I can reach over and hug my love who is lying next to me.  She drowsily asks me how I slept.  I tell her about the dream, and she says that it was just a dream.  I look at the slumbering dogs lying on the floor.  One is chasing something imaginary in her sleep.  Just like me.

I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams. Jonas Salk

Fears

I had the old anxiety dream last night in which I was alone and looking for the person that I love. It always ends the same way in which I find the person who wants nothing to do with me and is drunk. This is a recurring dream of fear and loss that I have had throughout the duration of my marriage. A therapist once described it as post-traumatic stress syndrome from the anxiety over drinking. I think that it goes deeper and right to my childhood where I became fearful of being left alone by one or both parents. My parents were older than those of my school mates since I was born when they were around 40. With my father's drinking there was a lot of anxiety resulting from that. My mother didn't drink at all but when I was older she suffered from major bouts of depression. I got help as needed for her and she lived a long life, although she would be debilitated by severe depression from time to time.

Alcoholics are unreliable, especially from an emotional standpoint. I think that over the years I developed a lot of insecurities around what to expect from an emotional standpoint. My marriage has been tumultuous with the ups and downs that go with someone who is a depressed alcoholic. Although I am in Al-Anon and realize that I am powerless over people, places and things, I still have an incredible amount of anxiety that bubbles to the surface at times. Those are the moments when I literally have to do something to get my mind off the alcoholic and onto me by doing something that I like to do that takes me away from the immediate anxiety. When this happens in the middle of the night though, it is a hard thing to deal with. I keep books by the bed and read them. It helps to keep One Day at a Time or Courage to Change nearby. It also helps to know that things will generally be better in the light of day when I can get to a meeting and focus on the hear and now and not the imagined fears or the past.