And then, my head exploded: Exploding Head Syndrome

Actually, my head didn't explode. But I do occasionally suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome, a weird phenomenon that, since I've had it for as long as I can remember, is probably more common than anyone realizes. It's just that, who are you going to tell? And what are you going to say?
(Simulated conversation)
"Honey, someone hit the house with a car!"
"Um, no they didn't."
"Then it must have been an earthquake!"
"Um, no. No earthquake."
Googles. Sure enough, no earthquake in the news. "All the doors in the house slammed at the same time?"
"Now you're just being silly."
"Okay, okay. It must have just been my head exploding."
"What?!"

I've felt burning, prickling, and even stabbing sensations in my sleep associated with dreams, or perhaps the dreams try to 'explain' the sensation by making me suddenly walk over sharp coral or getting shot or stabbed. And no, I don't wake up with a body part that's fallen asleep when this happens. So that's pretty weird. I've had full-color (which isn't supposed to happen) full sensation, vivid dreams that border on hallucinations. These dreams, separate in experience from my other dreams, are associated with a period of time when I had severe sleep disturbance issues that they tried to treat and ended up giving me epic nightmares. Ugh. I've also had 'normal' full color, no sensation dreams that nonetheless seem so vivid and important that I remember them for years afterward, like the one where I found a newspaper article about the first centaurs created by science in someone's tower-house attic. I've done lucid dreaming (fun, btw) where I can consciously seize control of the dream environment and continue to dream. And my creativity is clearly linked in a reciprocal fashion to dreaming. If I don't write with full engagement of all my powers of Kami every day, I'll start to dream weirder and more vivid dreams, then nightmares, until finally I find a time when I can do some serious writing and then the dreaming returns to my regularly scheduled programs. And if I'm in the middle of an intense writing period, I'll get incredibly lame, super-boring dreams where I'm shopping for an item and can't find it, or I'm at work. And then I have to wake up and go to work or go shopping. Ugh. What a waste of good dream time. It's like all the creativity that poured out of me into my writing drained my lake-o-inventiveness and left behind a sludge of boring.

But this annoying thing, this exploding head syndrome thing, though it doesn't happen very often (maybe a couple of times a year) is so bad, so frightening ... and yet it's happened often enough now that when it happens and I wake up (today it woke me at a reasonable hour, 5:30 am, which is nice because now I can get an early start on my day) I can accept (almost every time–not this morning though, whoooo boy!) that no, the house wasn't whisked away in a tornado and we didn't just land in Oz with a tremendous crash that killed one of the wicked witches.

As awesome as that would be.

And I can usually go back to sleep.

Not always, though.

This morning, it's good that I'd pretty much had a full night's sleep because I could not have gone back to sleep. My heart was going a million miles an hour, I felt hungover (and no, didn't have a drop of alcohol, actually hadn't had even a nightcap since Sunday–hey, could that be my problem? :P ) and I was absolutely, positively sure that an intruder had dropped something incredibly heavy, as in, the entire house when the jacks had given way (except there was no falling sensation just before so maybe it was just the half of the house I wasn't in.) (And there were no associated rattles or glass crashing so clearly it was emptied already of all our stuff.) (And the wood framing had to be stabilized in some way because there were no snaps, crackles or pops.)

It was really unpleasant and frightening, to say the least. I was actually afraid to explore the house, I was so sure that there was a crazy, clumsy intruder downstairs.

Some doctors believe that you'll get clusters of these exploding head thingies when you're stressed. I don't know about that. I am incredibly stressed and overworked right now, but I've been incredibly stressed before and I didn't get them. There's no way for me to remember if I was stressed when this happened before. I suppose, now that I've blogged about it, I can make a little note on future blogs at the end and we can track it together.

So, if you see something about my head exploding at the end of future blogs, don't be alarmed. It's for science.

And now that my head has exploded, I can start my day. I hope you have a great one! And may your head never explode.

The Idea Monster

My idea monster likes cookies.  Apparently he also likes black tie cheesecake because I received a whopper of an idea in my idea inbox today after a nice dinner and dessert at Olive Garden (courtesy of a gift from my beloved INK comrades--thank you!)  It might become a short story, but I suspect that it's more of a novel-length idea (as usual, argh.)

I really don't need another novel idea.  I've already got enough projects to keep me busy for the next decade, easily.  But I don't like to let these things pass me by, because I never know what's going to write itself, and what I'm going to be struggling with for years.  I prefer to have a variety of projects at various stages.  It's one of the habits I nurture so that I'm never blocked.  If I'm having trouble writing on one project, chances are very good that switching to another project will get me writing again (and often I can come back to the blocked project with fresh enthusiasm and ideas in short order.)

Usually what I do when I have an exciting idea is I open a new file, type a few sentences and then save it under a memory-jogging title.  

How do you keep track of ideas (if you bother) and do you ever come back to them?

Thursday

It's gray and cool outside, perfect weather for gardening.  Unfortunately I'm in the dumps.  Lots of complex emotions working through me.  But I've had my morning oatmeal and that makes almost anything better.  Just waiting for it to kick in.  Maybe I'll have some chocolate for a quick pick me up until the more complex carbs start their magic.  Yep, it's called better living through chemicals.  No artificial ones required today.  Mother Nature has more than enough luvin' for me.

Last night I wrote some on a short story.  I'm waiting for the twist to occur to me, but in the meantime I have plenty of normal plot to work through.  I think I might be getting better at the whole short plot thing.  The issue now is how to keep the writing awake and alive.  At novel length I have no problems (or at least I don't think I don't) keeping the world active.  There's so much going on not just in the pov character's life but all around it--political stuff, weather, economic issues, cities and nations teeming with problems, rural life keeping the urban dwellers fed and the disconnect between them, things spiritual, societal attitudes changing and staying the same in a swirly vanilla chocolate cone of cultural existence, on and on.  Things come at the characters from way in the outfield, or sideswipe them.  There's opportunities for random things.  Grandma passes away.  George gets the flu.  There's a storm, or an earthquake, or a heat wave.  

There's not much room for those sorts of things in a short story.  There's not very much room overall in a short story.  So I struggle with richness.  I feel a little impoverished when I write a short story, in addition to feeling inadequate.  But at least when I'm actually writing instead of thinking about writing, all those worries go away.  

Dreams of Death

I had a rough day yesterday, rough but fun.  Actually, just a rough morning.  I enjoyed lunch at McMenamins, great times with Rory, and accomplished some writing stuff in the evening.

It was the dream.  In classic Kami dreams about a lost pet mode, Mojo was darker than he was in life.  He was still white, but he had darker points--still patterned like a tabby, but brown and black striping like Wiz instead of ginger and buff.  I was so happy.  I knew in the dream that he'd died, but somehow he'd come back and I didn't care how.  I picked him up and held him close--and that's when the dream fell apart.  He was weightless in my arms and the illusion couldn't hold up to reality.  I woke so empty, not even being able to dream about him without my conscious mind stepping in and saying nope, it's not real, tough luck subconscious you can't enjoy this.  

This morning I dreamt that a friend of mine from high school got sick and died.  I got to tell him how bright, how strong and wonderful a human being he is, how the world needs people like him.  He seemed to be doing better, but then he died and I suffered through his funeral.  Once again I get to go through the morning with an ache in my chest and a lump in my throat.  

I'm sure he's fine.  It's just my brain thrashing around coping with something or other.  I might blame an external spiritual influence if this keeps up for no reason, but for the moment I think it's just my mind responding to lots of loss and change and potential.  Although growth and change can be very positive, even essential to survival, some very primitive parts of our minds want things to stay the same.  Any change, good or bad, causes stress responses.

In a tarot deck, the Death card represents change, whether it's good or bad.  Things are changing.  I'm not completely aware of what it is that's changing so much in the past few days that my dreams are affected, but I know it's been a big year.  Andy's death, two cancer announcements, my grandmother went blind in one eye, some relationship stuff, Mojo's death and Claire and Misty disappearing, the new pace in my attempts to publish, going to Radcon as a guest panelist with no actual publishing credentials, putting together the websites, never ending car trouble, financial pressure, losing the puppies and Beast and then having them all come home again, big vacations, a very busy OryCon including a bid to chair next year, Rory's book being accepted for publication--all lumped together in a twelve month period.  I'm sure I'm missing things too.

I started to write about how I feel like a delicate flower but on sober consideration, it really has been a big year.  I guess having a couple of death dreams in a row isn't out of line.  Writing about it helps.  The dreams help too, I'm sure, but it's not the easy sort of help.  More like physical therapy.  I can have a cheering section, but the heavy lifting I have to do by myself.  That's life, and love, in the big world.

My Multitasking Brain Likes to Melt

At the moment I'm both contributing to my blog and watching a DVD on revision called, "So, Is It Done?"  I love this.  

On the other hand, I was told at work by a customer that new research suggests that multi-tasking is bad for your brain.  (I wonder, is this more reliable than Googling for getting reliable information?  Heh.)  I'm not sure that's true, or what 'bad' means for that matter.  I can theorize that what the research might be pointing at is a need for the brain to be able to focus, fully, on one thing.  Deep thinking--not the philosophical or spiritual concept, but the physical process--is intoxicating and I like the idea that it's necessary for mental health.  But multitasking is challenging and a pretty neat skill too.  Studies I can't specifically cite have been quoted as saying that women are better at it than men.  Does that simply mean that women can tolerate that sort of mental abuse better?

Brain exercises of many kinds can be good for you.  There's evidence that learning a new skill every year, whether it's a new kind of game, foreign language phrases, or a physical skill like woodworking, keeps your brain more youthful.  So I'm not too worried that learning how to watch a DVD while typing a blog entry will melt my brain.  Or if it does, the melting doesn't feel bad.  If anything, I feel good.  Productive.  Especially with this DVD.  I'm familiar with quite a few aspects of the revision process, so I'm just listening for reminders, fresh perspectives, and new tools.  I wrote most of this while the DVD discussed the reasons why it's good to give your draft a vacation so that your subconscious can work while the manuscript 'rests.'

In submission news, I'm working hard on a snail mail submission.  I'm hoping to mail it out on Monday.  It'll be technically late (Sunday is my deadline--I think I'll rethink this and just make it Monday since I can't mail anything on Sundays) but it'll be better than if I sent it out today.

I'm super-jealous right now.  They're discussing short stories, and laying them out on a table so that you can look at the whole physical thing at once.  That would take about 500 sq. ft. without paths to walk among the pages if I did that to Masks.  Maybe a chapter at a time?  Still, it's a neat idea that generally speaking is a bit impractical.  My next short story, I'll consider this technique.  It's fun to learn new ways to play.  Er, write.  Okay, play.