Dreams of Dementia

I realised my blog has been dead for months.
I myself somehow feel somewhat dead too even more so since I came back from Canada.  

Praised be I, writing, dead already and dead again" - Jack Kerouac

Add to this my unpleasant stay at the hospital. The usual post travel depression I suppose that has been haunting me for years now.

Life goes on here at a different pace, on a different planet kind of, where nothing seems to matter much between sunrise and sunset or rising up and laying down in my case which are closer to sunrise and sunset than ever lately.

Plus I’ve had a couple more dreams of dementia / Alzheimer’s lately and it makes me realise maybe somewhat 

(here is a nice solid expression: maybe somewhat, nothing like determination and conviction eh? J )

It makes me realise, as we all should, that life is very short and consciousness is extremely fragile.

Does it make me act better? Of course not.

If I try to find the one thing I’d love to do it seems like “writing my dystopia” comes to the top of my mind automatically but the sketch alone seems to be an impossible task to create. One just does not conjure a dystopia out of thin air no matter how much one loves other people’s dystopia.  You would think I should read more dystopias and watch more dystopian movies really but no, this is not happening either.

In fact my current reading (the word reading alone creates such a turmoil of emotions in me, of dreams and failures and realisation of my ‘hopeless’ condition, where as much as I love reading and do have plenty of time to escape into it my mind has kind of slipped away at the concentration level and I am slowly slipping on the downside of this Charlie Gordon bipolar wave) so my current reading as I say is a HUGE endeavour, in fact an interesting almost impossible challenge for me but time will tell, I have started to read nothing short of PROUST’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. 

What a task for an unreliable bipolar mind to undertake.  Let me bore you with numbers for a sec here (if you hate numbers well just skip this paragraph then J )

War and Peace 587,287 words

593,493 in the Old Testament and 181,253 in the New Testament giving                774,746 words

God = 774,746 words

Shakespeare = 884,421 words

J.K. Rowling  1,084,170 words

(such as the Harry Potter series which totals)

PROUST: 1, 200,000 words  4,211 pages, 7 volumes

Could be worse I could be reading

Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan 3M 304k  or

Malazan Book of the Fallen - Steven Erikson 3M 325k

Mind you I have read a few words in my life but sparingly my know bible alone reading amounts to 6,329,487 counting my 7 times the whole book plus 5 more times the NT and not counting the innumerable times where I started at the beginning and “died” somewhere either in Exodus or Chronicles the great killer.

Also had many reading sprees over the ages, L.M. Montgomery, John Irving etc

end of number obsession J

Anyway it has been a pleasure so far to read Proust (and according to many that is all that counts, pleasure) and I do understand how he made it to 1.2 million words as he alone can go on and on and attach one synonym after another forever and ever, let’s add 4 more adjectives here and 3 more verbs yeah that should do it. I would absolutely HATE to be his translator though. J

So back to what should I do with the rest of my life well right now I have about 90 minutes to think about it.  Most good writers apparently also must be avid readers but where is the balance between the two, hell if I know.  

There will be some reading I suppose and maybe one day that magic sketch will pop in my mind all written up
(isn’t this how everything happens?)   

In the meanwhile, we go on one breath at a time hoping order will keep on fighting chaos for a little while yet.

For some of us, chaos seems to be having a ball lately and for others well it is just temporarily delayed because in the end as we know what Maxwell Smart did not tell you is that KAOS always win, and CONTROL is just a temporary illusion, like the ephemeral beauty of agent 99.

J

I could rattle on forever about the merits again of questioning everything, of challenging every word, of the hubris and self-righteousness of religion and most philosophies, about the necessity to break out from the crowd but to go where exactly? We are unfortunately gregarious animals, hopeless apes and there is no gratification in sitting on top of a mountain alone with the possession of all truths and all wisdom, with a clear, unpoisoned even though somewhat very limited mind.  As we will only be as the Floyd once said

older 
Shorter of breath 
And one day closer to death 

So Ciao for now then and you keep on thinking y’all,
even when I here will stop one way or another.

 Adding on my dream just for the record

I do not remember my dreams most of the time unfortunately (or is it fortunately now?) but this one I do, 45 mins after getting up and it went a little like this.

I was living in an apartment on the first floor, apartment 6 in fact, and also in the back of my mind I was owning/renting ANOTHER apartment.

First thing I remembered after was being a mile away from my place in a blizzard, crossing a very dangerous street in the dark and cold, squeezing between fast traffic lines of trucks and buses and cars in the snow and in the dark too.  After crossing that very busy road I ended up walking a mile in fear of death in a very cold and dark and lonely road barely dressed.

Then I got to where I live, apartment 6, but everything had changed, it was now a room full of chairs.  I saw someone and asked him the day, month and then the year.  He said something like 17 (or 23?) of November and then when I asked for the year again he said 2013.  In my mind it was kind of like September and I realised I had totally lost a couple of months in my life not remembering a thing.

Also I was trying to figure out why was I caught in such a blizzard as early as November as well.

I found the janitor and showed him my room. At first he did not recognise me but then he remembered. He said: “You said goodbye and you said you were not coming back”.

In the meanwhile I was really lost and confused and scared wondering where the hell I had been for the past 2 months without a single memory left of it.

This is not the first time I dream I have dementia / Alzheimer’s but it is quite a troubling nightmare.  One has always wondered for millennia whether dreams really have any significance.