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.

Happy Sad Dreams

I'm at Papa's Ice Cream & Deli, having a yummy sandwich with my DH and the girl, who just passed her final exam at driving school.  Soon now, she'll have enough practice to try for her driver's license.  I'll warn y'all if she gets it.

Still no sign of Carey.  I sometimes (often, actually) dream about our animals after they've gone missing or died.  In the dream she came home in through the dog yard.  For a few minutes I was completely, ecstatically happy.  I wanted to run and tell the girl, but first I had to pet her and pick her up and tell her what a good kitty she was.  Then, of course, I woke up.  The dogs were barking, so I went out in a robe and slippers and looked around just in case.  No cats, no coyotes, no raccoons, no deer.  The dogs calmed down after I went out.  I think the fog, which was pretty thick and smelled like dry dust, kind of freaked them out and my going out and looking around reassured them.  Or maybe they thought they were all in trouble.  Maybe both.

I spent a few hours typing on a book and then went back to bed.  Today is going to be a loooong day, with maybe five non-consecutive hours of sleep.  I feel okay now.  I'm dreading the carb crash later ....

I Slept! (41474)

I slept last night!  I slept I slept I slept for I think about six hours, and then after I got the kids off to school I got in another couple of hours and it was glorious!  

So I had lots more energy today and actually got the downstairs looking nice.  The upstairs is a disaster, plain and simple, but a disaster I can live with.

I haven't written at all on my Nano for two days.  Shame on me!  But I'll probably have some time while my DH is napping, and I plan to be at the write-in at OryCon 30.  The finish line is right there.  I can almost touch it.  But the big welcome home became hugely more important than Nano.  I even dreamt about it last night, apologizing for what a pit the place was.  My house isn't particularly tidy on the best of days, but in the dream it was ten times worse than usual.  Poopyheaded anxiety dreams.  

Tonight, if (when!) I get to sleep, I trust that the poopyheaded anxiety dreams will be well at bay.  But the dreams I will have will be intense, as they always are when I haven't written in a couple of days.  Wish me luck that they don't become nightmares, or even more inventive anxiety dreams.

The prep that never ends

The kitteh is tearing around the house like a maniac.  I wonder if she does this as a way to blow off steam when things aren't going her way.  Right now the thing that's not going her way is that mom isn't going to bed.  Bedtime means pouncing things that move under the blankets, tunneling in blankets, playing king of the bed with other cats and then a good long nap.  And of course in the morning there's the races back and forth across the bed to look forward to.

I know how she feels.  I still haven't had time to write much and it's making me restless.  No letting up on the schedule tomorrow, either.  I have a bunch of tile to mortar in.  It's all cut and looks dandy, but I had to take a break from tiling to clear out as much as I could of the downstairs.  Why?  Because I had an offer of help, and snagged it.  We worked from about 10am until about 4.  There are still a few more things, but nothing the kids and I can't do in a relatively short amount of time.

If I get the tile mortared in fairly quickly I may have some writing time.  The good thing about all this waiting is that my dreams are becoming very vivid (I seldom have vivid dreams when I'm writing) and I'm very eager to get back to writing.  This is a good combination for the generation of some short stories.

Dreaming of the Caribbean

We've been contemplating the possibility of cruising in the Caribbean.  Not sure we'll be able to pull it off, but one of the possibilities could connect us with The Brig Unicorn.  You know me and tall ships and cannons.  

The trick is figuring out who will take care of the animals while we're gone.  The cruises I've been looking at are 7-10 days.  That's a long, long time to be away, especially since we'll probably spend two additional days flying.  If all we has was cats I wouldn't think much of it. We could ask someone to just fill up their bowls and maybe clean out the catboxes once.  We'd probably come home to kitty protest puke and unrolled toilet paper everywhere, but hey, they'd forgive us eventually.  The dogs and goats and bunnies ... whole 'nother matter.

We may also take the train to Seattle and from there the ferry to downtown Victoria, stay there for about a week or so.  Far, far less expensive, but unfortunately the time away from home is the same.

I love our dysfunctional farm, but it would be nice to be able to clean the place up, ask someone to pick up our mail and feed the cats, and go without worrying.  Instead there's a good hour or more of work out here between feeding/watering animals if for no other reason that there's a lot of walking around that has to happen plus the dogs will need some attention in the form of catch or just sitting with them and snuggling.  Fortunately the time periods we're looking at won't require hours of garden watering.  It'll be raining and cool in the Pac NW (which would be a downside to going to Victoria except that we don't do that much that's strictly outdoors there.)

In the Caribbean it'll be warm.  Mmm, I close my eyes and remember the tropical skies ... and open them to our local periwinkly-blue and grin, because we live in one of the more beautiful places in the world, and right now it's warm and gorgeous and homey and most of my favorite things are right here.

Morning sweetness

The little fluffy personalities are back.  I heard them first thing this morning when I woke up.  My bedroom window is open except in the hottest and coldest weather so I can usually hear who's up and about, whether it's coyotes, the hummingbirds engaging in their constant wars, the sparrows, the towhees, the goats picking through the flattened blackberry patch (yay goats!) one of our hawks, geese with their strangely mournful cries flying overhead, the soothing voices of content cattle, horses galloping like fools around the pasture, dogs barking at evil bicyclists or people walking up the road or horses going by or sanitation employees stealing our garbage or the mailman or the bunny nibbling in the veggie patch, or rain (and the scent that comes with it) or rushing wind making music with the leaves of thousands of trees, or the simple quiet of first morning light as I wake from a dream.

Flash! Bang!

First, a reminder to read Flash Fiction Online.  The new edition is out, and there's a great article by Bruce Holland Rogers.  It's the first of a series, and I can't wait for the next installment.  He has a livejournal you can link to from the wikipedia article.  No excuses, people.  Writers have got to read, and reading a flash is going to take less time than it will to go to the fridge, figure out what you want to eat, and bring it back to the computer.  

Argh!  We're under attack!  Please stand by ...

Yes, we finally reached the day when we went on our battle cruise on the glorious Lady Washington with the graceful Hawaiian Chieftain.  

I wish I had a deeper way than photographs and movies to record what we experienced.  Oh, wait, hey, I'm a writer!  Woot!  

I'd say it fulfilled a lifelong dream, but since I never imagined it would be possible to sail on a ship with cannons firing, well, I guess I can say it fulfilled a lifelong dream I never knew I could have.  

See the sail folded up neatly along the mast and angling into the boom below the sailors in the rigging?  That's the spanker (first definition on the link), and my job was to manage the brails--the lines that keep the spanker out of the wind until it's needed. Ten people to a side are ideal to manage the brails when we're hauling it in, about half that when we haul it back out again.   During the battle we hauled that baby out and tucked her back tight several times.  Sometimes the spanker sail helped, and sometimes it actually slowed us down depending on the situation with the tight, variable conditions on the river.  The captain made the call, and we'd haul the outhaul or haul the brails.  I had to sling my camera back right quick every time I heard the captain say spanker.  In a different context, I guess that could be considered kinky ...

When they asked for volunteers I thought for certain that every passenger on board would leap up and cry me me me!  But only about a baker's dozen of us, almost a quarter of them kids, ran back to help.  I got to manage the brails on the port side, but then I lost my job to Brandon for a while when he asked if he could take my place.  Later he got promoted to the helm and, with a whole bunch of other kids, ran the rudder back and forth at the captain's command, so I got the brails again.  Yay brails!

It got cold, but we didn't have rain so it wasn't miserable by any means.  The capricious winds made for an interesting fight.  The Lady Washington is amazingly nimble, and I mean really incredible. 

The crew was very welcoming, informative, and patient with their guests.  I highly recommend touring the ship, sailing with it on a sunset or battle sail if you can, or best of all (a personal goal of mine) signing up for one of the family adventures they offer in the San Juan islands.  I probably won't go this year (watch me change my mind as longing for sailing and the sea keep eating at me) but next year I hope to be a passenger on their nature and historic tour of beautiful coastal Washington State.  They do it right.  

BTW, the kid in the lifeguard shirt?  Yep, that's Brandon at the brails.  He was a real shark for the fun posts.  I wonder if he'll become a sailor one day.  I know someday when I grow up, I'd like to be a sailor, even if it's on a wee river sailboat, lazy rigged so I can run her all by my lonely if I have to.  Judging by how the family reacted to the experience, though, I won't be alone unless I beg for it.

Strangers Think They Know Me

I finally found a title for my latest short story, "Strangers Think They Know Me."  I read an article on the SFWA website about titles and titling and got enough out of it that it made my job easier.  Thank goodness, just in time to keep myself from going insane.  I have almost as much trouble with titles as I have with naming characters.  I've been trying to title this particular short for four days, longer than it took me to write the darned thing, I kid you not.

I know I haven't been writing enough because I keep having these very vivid dreams that lead to story ideas.  It's a self-solving problem, at least until my dream space starts getting cliche', at which point not only will I not be writing enough to keep from dreaming, but I'll be bored while I'm dreaming.  Bummer.

So far, though, my dreams have been a rich mine.  Since I don't need more ore while I'm writing heavily, this arrangement with my subconscious suits me really well.  

I've got more short stories in the back brain to work on, but first, I have to visit Masks and Signet as I've had some ideas with both of them.  I find it's best to exploit ideas while they're still fresh.  If I'm given too much time to mull about them or if I discuss them too much with others, I lose that matchstick flash of enthusiasm.  I can slog with the best of them on a first draft, since I know the next flash will be along momentarily, but during editing those moments of heat and light are much more rare and precious.  So away to Masks, or Signet.  Maybe I'll keep both docs open at the same time and see what happens where.  I think I've got enough fire for both of them at the same time.  So, does that make us a ménage á trois?

My apologies to folks googling for something sexier than writing.  Boy are you on the wrong site!