Dreams; emptiness

One of the most interesting of the many interesting (and "...INteresting...") changes brought by MS has been the dreams. Not "bad," not "good," although if anything they've been "good"... but what they have been has been intense. As vivid, as real, as "dense" and solid as waking life. They're so "real" that I'm sometimes not sure whether something happened in a dream or in real life. And so "real" that sometimes I wake up from them exhausted, as though I've actually lived that period of my life.

A couple of nights ago, the dream was of playing the organ. I was playing a piece I've played since I first learned how to play the organ, no better or worse than I've ever played it; except, I was playing the pedals effortlessly. None of the I'm-not-sure-I'm-in-control issues that have plagued everything my feet and legs have tried to do over the past couple of years... I was just playing. Playing, in every way, normally. Or at least, what used to be "normally."

It was wonderful.

I've got two days before I see my acupuncturist, who I hope will pull me out of this energetic pothole. I don't like walking, I don't like talking, I can't really deal with the world or make what really should be simple decisions... I'm lying in bed using a new laptop-holding position I got from Lifehacker, I've got my iPhone tuned to Pandora's Healy Willan station, a new load of herbs from my Chinese herbalist is on the boil, and I'm going to do my utmost to just stay in bed until I can get needled.

Of the many things I don't like about The Disease, the one I like the least is that it causes me to feel vaguely, diffusely, indeterminately crappy, in a very hard-to-describe way. At least when you have a headache, you can say "My head hurts." At least the problem is clear. But when the when someone asks you how you feel and the best you can come up with is "... bleh..." because what's wrong is not just making you suffer (sort of) but resisting description, as to quality, location, and intensity of discomfort... Well, that's pretty much the poster case for "adding insult to injury." Assuming, of course, that you can call what's wrong "injury"... which is, itself, already quite the story, which itself is resisting being told.

Never a dull moment, eh?