boxofdelights

My sleep schedule is whacked again. Right now I get up at a reasonable time to let the dogs out, but I'm still so tired I feel sick, so I go back to sleep for four hours, and then I can't make myself go back to bed until the wee hours are not even wee anymore. And tomorrow I have an eye doctor appointment at 10. I accepted the time a couple weeks ago, when my sleep was not so whacked, but I should have known better.

One good thing about bad sleep is that it lets me remember my dreams. When I go back to bed, I don't usually put my CPAP back on (because I kid myself I'm not going to sleep, I'm just going to rest for a few minutes). So when I fall into REM sleep I start to suffocate, and wake up while I'm still in the dream. And then I fall asleep again while I'm thinking about the dream, and go back into REM sleep, which builds the dream up in layers. This morning, I was living in a big messy house with five children, assorted hangers-on, and a malicious shapeshifter which had been let into the house by my youngest child and discovered by my oldest companion. At first, he thought it was a neighbor child that had crawled into my bed. When he realized it wasn't a child, it changed into a piglet and ran off to hide among the dogs. (That reminds me of that great Rita Rudner line, "I think poodles are space aliens that think they have disguised themselves as dogs.") It was small, and not very smart, and easily tempted with food. My companion (who looked like Harold Finch, so that was nice) wanted to lock it in a suitcase and leave it in a Left Luggage Office. I thought that would be storing up trouble. Maybe not more trouble, but surprise trouble. We grew a plant that looked like a tomato, but the fruits were sweet and sticky, somewhat like grapes and somewhat like peppermint candies. They were green and translucent but striped green and reddish-green on the outside. I was about to taste one when I woke up. Probably not a good idea: like a tomato but not a tomato means Solanaceae and the fruits are probably poisonous. They sure were beautiful though.

Tomorrow I have to take the peripheral vision test, which I hate, because I'm bad at it, which makes the eye doctor worry that I'm developing glaucoma, except that he has enough history now to see that there is no consistency in where my misses cluster; I'm just bad at it. My left eye is weak: when I ask it to work at anything for more than a few seconds, it starts jittering, and from that point on I have to try to press the button for each real flash while I ignore the afterimages of the black dots the machine uses to center your vision, which appear every time my eye moves, which is constantly.

I went to the eye doctor a couple weeks ago because I thought my retina was detaching. I saw the arc of flashing lights in my peripheral vision. It turned out to be just an extra-sticky blob of eyeball goo, tugging on my retina as it detached itself from the side of the eyeball, to float in my field of vision for a while, and eventually settle on the bottom. After looking at my retina, the doctor wanted me to do the peripheral vision test, even though the pressure inside my eyeballs was fine. But I couldn't do it right then, because my eyes were dilated, so I have to go back in eight hours. Hope I get to sleep. Hope I wake up in time.