Recovery and Self-Care, 2025

Oh thank the dark and forgotten gods. 

I've been... not feeling well... for the last few days, mainly because I've been pushing way too hard with way too much stress for, I don't know, the last three weeks of May. I spent part of Monday just napping, took most of Tuesday off as an exhaustion/mental health day, and have just generally been feeling like I was right on the edge of making myself really, really sick (and I did have stomach/digestive issues, not to mention a truly horrible headache yesterday that may have been partly dehydration from the digestive issues). I've also been sleeping mostly in five-hour chunks, which isn't ideal. 

So yesterday I worked from home, but... cautiously, with breaks when I felt I needed them -- including napping for a bit of the afternoon and working to make it up in the evening -- and then went to bed with Beautiful Wife (also exhausted) at about 10:30. Didn't even pause to set up the CPAP, just climbed up and burrowed in. 

Finally -- finally -- had all the deeply weird, semi-narrative REM-sleep dreams that I've been missing. Woke up about 5:30, sweaty as anything, and just lay there thinking about random crap, the way I seldom have time to do anymore. Legit feels like I just shook off a fever, though I don't think I've actually been running one. 

The dreams were absolutely wild, too -- a three-part or three-element ceremony involving a circle of monsters (half feline, half canine -- so werewolves and were-panthers, maybe?) who had to move in and out and weave together in particular ways, a human at the center, and... something else that was important, but I can't remember it now. Probably wouldn't do me any good, since I don't seem to know any shapeshifters in real life and couldn't teach them the choreography anyway. Come to that, I don't actually remember what the ritual did, either, but  it was still pretty cool. 

I should put it in a piece of writing, somewhere. 

Next set of dreams started with younger-me and a whole bunch of other people in a fairly large house -- but there were a lot of us, so we were sleeping sort of wherever we could. (My parents showed up in this dream; my brother did not. I don't know if that means anything.) We were pulling together some sort of caravan, and there were a lot of decisions to make about what to bring and what to leave behind. Also, it was raining outside and the house had several significant leaks. 

Then we were actually in the caravan, and we were moving slowly because it was early morning and there were still traces of mist on the ground -- along with a lot of death and destructions -- fires, burned-down or smashed buildings, one truly spectacular corpse that was a badly-burned person(?) on a motorcycly, with the back half sunk into the ground. Looked like a war-zone, or the aftermath of a particularly bloody riot. Apparently the mist came out of the north, and it rises at night and anybody caught out in it dies -- or starts killing each other. 

Then we got to the place we were looking for, which was some kind of... factory? Power generation? Anyway, lots of cool ladders and bridges and big metal equipment. Also a couple of very friendly dogs, which turned out to be unfortunate because the dogs were helping to chase out some monsters that had gotten inside. The monsters were... weird. There was one like a two-legged balloon or egg. It did have a mouth, but it was awkward and not very dangerous, except that when it died it exploded into a small cloud of that death-mist, which did horrible things to the dogs until there was only one dog left. Unlike most of my dreams, I was both young (like, late teens maybe?) and unarmed, so I was avoiding the beasties by climbing ladders, jumping platforms, and like that. There were some other monsters too, at least one that stalked around like some sort of human-sized, featherless hunting bird, but at least those didn't explode into mist when they died. 

Anyway, I woke up before I had a chance to find out why we'd come there or what the workers were doing there, but it was intense and interesting and left me feeling more connected -- to my dreaming or myself, I'm not sure -- and just generally like I'd finally gotten a little bit of my breath back. 

Like I said, thank the dark and forgotten gods for that.