14 July 2007
Saturday
[Journal not posted until Sunday at 8:45 AM. My body dictated sleep last night and I listened.]
High-Level Journal Summary: After retiring my french horn because of chemo, having a bizarre dream about showing up for a performance after not touching my instrument for 1.5 years. It was a borderline nightmare.
This triggered a little research on this subject where I found two fascinating topics. The "neurology of dreams" gets into how the brain works in helping to generate these dreams. The "psychodynamic interpretation of dreams" gets into interpreting dreams.
In reading the various medical research and cognitive theories about each (respectively), it furthered my opinion that dealing with the brain is perhaps one of THE most complex parts of the entire human body. Would that not be an absolutely fascinating topic with a group of neurosurgeons, neuro-oncologists, and neuro-pathologists?
Countdowns:
1.) Day 6 of 28 in my 23rd 5/23 Temodar chemotherapy cycle. Another tough day in the chemo cycle. However, my body has become so sensitive to the impact of Temodar that I could physically tell that I did not take Temodar this morning. My body was given some breathing room where I could just take a breath and start to recover. Amen!
2.) On 7/15/07, get physical therapy and therapeutic massage from Jevene Summers. It has been 6 weeks since Jevene has done work on me. I can feel it. She will have a busy 1.5 hours.
2007 Seizure Activity:
1.) Last Simple Partial Seizure, or SPS, was 9 days ago.
2.) In 2007, I have had 30 SPS's in 195 days. This is an average of 1 SPS every 6.5 days, exactly.
Website Updates:
1.) An online journal was added today for 12/14/04. This is the first day I returned to work after my brain biopsy on 12/10/04. My handwritten journals from December 2004 have been kindly transcribed for me by Dusty Ayala.
2.) A content-heavy message was posted today which may be easily missed since so many messages have been posted recently. It is worth checking out. It is the 7/11/07 Message from Cathy. It asks for clarification on a number of issues from defining "progress" when taking Temodar chemo to questioning "guilt" for not making better progress during treatments. I like these challenging questions. It spurs the kind of dialogue that should ultimately be taken to medical teams.
Actual Journal: On the weekend after taking Temodar chemotherapy, I do three things:
1.) Sleep a lot.
2.) Eat as my appetite slowly comes back.
3.) Exercise, even when it feels contrary to my overall energy level.
Take note that I did not say "shower." That did not happen today. Nor did I say "shave." That did not happen today, either. It was one of those gruffy days that guys are allowed to have every now and then. Today, I needed it. I just needed to recover from Day 5 of chemo, which turned out to be an unusually tough day.
Sleeping and dreaming
So it is that I spend about half my day sleeping. I went into periods of deep sleep that ended up having long matinee dreams. Last night, the same story played out in my dream almost all night long, it seemed.
I have not played my horn since 4/16/06. I miss a week of playing each chemo cycle, and my energy is just so precious right now that I need to focus it in other places. That is why I decided (on 12/31/06) to retire my horn playing after 30 years. I needed to do so and properly focus. This information played a big part in my dream last night.
Another aspect of my dream came from what I did before going to bed last night. Then, I was reading my handwritten journals from 1989, and one journal was about a day when I did almost nothing but music all day long -- even though I was studying engineering at Virginia Tech. This in combination with my recent french horn retirement triggered deep dreams that played for hours. Here is how it went.
French horn nightmare
I showed up to a gig after not playing my horn for 1.5 years. My old horn instructor was there, Wallace Easter. It was a sold out crowd, and there was also a drum corps show going on in an adjacent stadium. As such, I was meeting all these old friends in the parking lot. Plus, a woman liked my tuxedo and wanted my phone number. (Doesn't this men/women stuff always happen in dreams? It makes it authentic!) As a result of all these things, I ended up being late to the performance.
To make matters worse, consider everything else that I found as I arrived to this gig:
• I had never looked at the music before (it was never sent to me). I had assumed that it was an easy part hidden in the orchestra with a full horn section. Wrong!
• By accident, I grabbed someone else's french horn, and when I tried to make a noise I realized that the mouthpiece was somehow in backwards. (Hey -- this was a dream!)
• This other horn had "reverse plumbing" (the 1st valve was the third valve and visa versa) -- which makes NO sense at all. French horns like this do not exist in this world, nor could they. It would cause almost all the fingerings to change.
• The music was in bass clef rather than in treble clef, which requires some basic transposition skills.
• The music required a stopped horn, which lowers the pitch by 1/2 step and requires more complex transposition skills.
• The music required transposition to other keys, which means a third layer of advanced transposition skills.
• The music required all three transpositions at the same time. Ugh! Who wrote this stuff?
• The music had all sorts of scattered 16th notes.
• The music was played at an incredibly fast tempo.
• The music was not a well-known piece so it was new to my ears.
...does this nightmare stop there? No!
• I had not warmed up.
• The first half the concert had been canceled because I was not there.
• The two featured horns (Wally and me) were the MAIN feature in this music and in the ENTIRE performance.
The director was livid with me. Instead of rehearsing then and there before the second half of the concert began, I told Wally that I needed to go find MY horn. That is when I tried to make sound again on the horn I had in my hands...in private where nobody could hear me. I knew I was in trouble, but I tried to think through the basics of 30 years of playing.
Let my air do the work. Breath. "Dah" attack. Keep the air moving.
But, I sounded like I did when I was in 5th grade, when I first began playing my french horn. It was pathetic.
How did it end?
I finally woke up at 5:45 AM and said, "Hey, buddy, it's just a dream." I took a deep breath. (I then played a chromatic scale with my left hand to make sure that I had all my french horn fingerings still under my belt. My muscle memory is still there after 30 years of playing. That was somehow assuring.)
What does all this mean?
You know this could just be a fun story to share. I could just leave things there and post this journal entry. But I actually think there is more to a dream such as this.
After a little research, I found two main buckets if information that are interesting. The "neurology of dreams" gets into how the brain works in helping to generate these dreams. The second is the "psychodynamic interpretation of dreams," which gets into interpreting dreams. In both these areas, opinions, theories, and research seem to vary widely. Still, they are extremely thought-provoking.
1.) Wikipedia excerpt from Neurology of dreams
Hobson's 1976 research suggested that the signals interpreted as dreams originated in the brain stem during REM sleep. However, research by Mark Solms suggests that dreams are generated in the forebrain, and that REM sleep and dreaming are not directly related. While working in the neurosurgery department at hospitals in Johannesburg and London, Solms had access to patients with various brain injuries. He began to question patients about their dreams and confirmed that patients with damage to the parietal lobe stopped dreaming; this finding was in line with Hobson's 1977 theory. However, Solms did not encounter cases of loss of dreaming with patients having brain stem damage. This observation forced him to question Hobson's prevailing theory which marked the brain stem as the source of the signals interpreted as dreams. Solms viewed the idea of dreaming as a function of many complex brain structures as validating Freudian dream theory, an idea that drew criticism from Hobson.
2.) Wikipedia excerpt about Psychodynamic interpretation of dreams
Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung identify dreams as an interaction between the unconscious and the conscious. They also assert together that the unconscious is the dominant force of the dream, and in dreams it conveys its own mental activity to the perceptive faculty. While Freud felt that there was an active censorship against the unconscious even during sleep, Jung argued that the dream's bizarre quality is an efficient language, comparable to poetry and uniquely capable of revealing the underlying meaning. Fritz Perls presented his theory of dreams following the holistic nature of gestalt therapy. Dreams are seen as being projections of parts of oneself. Often these are parts that have been ignored, rejected or even suppressed and there is a scientific proof for this. One aim of gestalt dream analysis is to accept and reintegrate these. According to Perls, the dream needs to be accepted in its own right - not broken down and analysed out of existence.
I never know what I will find
A hard decision in life to make to retire my horn playing during chemo. A later dream about this. A little research on the subject. Learning how the brain may work to generate these dreams and various theories about what dreams may mean. Pretty fascinating.
What does all this tell me? Dealing with the brain is perhaps one of THE most complex parts of the entire human body. Would that not be an absolutely fascinating topic with a group of neurosurgeons, neuro-oncologists, and neuro-pathologists?
