For the past month, I’ve been coming out of a fairly bleak bout of clinical depression. I started taking my fluoxetine again, got outside, got exercise, did a little gardening, and the bete noir clawing at the back of my head has dwindled away. This is a good thing.
One of the interesting side effects I’ve noted, either of taking Prozac or possibly from my brain’s recovery, is that as my sleep habits returns to normal, I have some extremely vivid dreams. They tend to be in the morning, or at least I remember the ones that happen in the morning, and I don’t remember the ones from the middle or beginning of the nights.
This morning, it was that I’d been sent to a penal colony on the Moon (ala The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), and there I’d joined a group of guerrilla fighters against the Third Reich Nazis who’d taken over the place. Moon Nazis really are the worst, because with the Moon’s 1/6 gravitational pull, those Panzer tanks were real bastards. Plus, I was annoyed that the bad guys got the cool uniforms.
Previous to that, it was a sword - a katana, I think - that was so thin, viewed edge-on, it was invisible. In the right hands, it had cut a beam of sunlight from the heavens (which was then sewn into a kimono by the daughter of the sky). At the time, two cranky old men played a game of fist-sized stones in a small stream, each stone with a sigil that changed when one of them wrote a new sigil on a slip of paper and placed it on the stone. They were in charge of guarding the sword, and if anyone messed with them, it was serious ass-whupping time. A team of ninja assassin warriors had been hired to steal the sword. You could only join their team if you had once been a samurai, forsworn your oaths for love and had your heart broken. I woke up during the battle. The ninjas were definitely getting the worst of it.
So, what are your vivid dreams, and what do you believe influences them? I expect in a few weeks, my REM sleep will fade into the background, and I won’t wake up, trying to puzzle out how to get a stow-away aboard a rocket back to Earth when the weight is precalculated for exact fuel specifications.