I had an off-kilter dream last night. I was driving a co-worker somewhere and racking up points on my license. I leaned the car on one side — two wheels — to pass someone, then drove up on the curb to get around someone else. My co-worker looked nervous. When we were caught in a traffic jam, somebody pulled out a raggedy paper wand (think Harry Potter, but looking like a curly tree branch) to show my co-worker, complaining that it was the best he could do. My co-worker handed it to me, and for some inexplicable reason, I ate it. Then the fellow wanted it back and I didn’t want to admit what I’d done, but by that time the traffic had started moving again, so I sped away.
There were now several of us, and because we needed a place to work, I led our group to a friend’s house. It was a really nice place! Since it was the middle of the day, my friend was at work, so we simply went in (home invasion, anyone?). There, I repainted part of the room we were in as we ate pizza. I think I broke a few things too, but managed to glue them together. Finally my friend came home and gave me a hug as I apologized for not calling her before breaking into her house. She was totally cool with it.
All the while, as I was doing these crazy things, I kept asking myself, “WHY did I just do that?” But then I’d go on to the next crazy thing as if it were perfectly normal, followed by another “WTF???” from myself. I felt guilty and out of control, at least in between committing these various crimes.
You know those dreams you wake up from and think, “Whew! Only a dream!”? I wreaked enough havoc in this one to elicit that response. I’m writing about this because that’s how I feel sometimes. Like I’m stumbling around doing things that don’t make sense, only to catch myself after the fact and wonder what I was thinking. Granted, the things I’m doing are not likely to put me in jail or get me committed. But I seem to lose focus and get lost in a crack between the reality of the previous second and the reality of the next one. It’s as if I enter another dimension for a split-second before pulling myself out of it and going on.
This, they (the proverbial ‘they’) tell me, is normal. A weird cocktail of chemo brain, tamoxifen and getting pulled into menopause a bit before my time. I am trying to navigate this “normal” and don’t quite know what to do with it. Eventually it’s gotta pass, right?
Frantic Shanti 
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