Directed Dreaming: Elephant Teeth and Roller-Coasters

Enchanted Kingdom, Sta. Rosa, Philippines, photo by  pattyequalsawesome (Patty Lagera) 

Without meaning to, this blog has become a chart of sorts, plotting the course of the infection in my bones, and the always amusing neurological affliction that is CRPS.  As I approach a new surgery date for the removal of my left shoulder prosthesis and a good old-fashioned washout of the joint, the primacy of the physical seems to be reasserting itself.

No, that's not true.  More the primacy of misery, a matter of pure choice.

You'll be forgiven if you added: "Don't forget the insanity and considerable free-floating anxiety that is your baseline, dear, dear prof-de-rien!"

I passed an uncomfortable night, marked by fits of chills followed by hours of very painful spasms, mostly in my right leg, but also with some jerkifying input from the left side.  I still have the chills and am happy to own so many soft and organic layering pieces, happy that hoodies are the rage, as my hoods are up, up, up.  My temp is only 100.6, not abnormally high for me, but I cannot stop shaking.

So distraction is the name of today's game.  It worked now and then during the night, taking me through several hundred pages of a trilogy I'm reading -- all the while continuing my obsession with peach yogurt and kettle corn.  Buddy the freakishly large kitten appreciates my food fixations (see the video from a few days ago featuring buddy and the yogurt carton).  Seeing him with the container stuck on his head has become a common sight but it still cracks me up...

In good news (there is always something from the Order of Good going on, if I will just look):  I continue to sleep way more than usual.  I also continue to have fascinating dreams -- thanks, I believe, to a doubling of one of my medications.  Drug-induced or just happenstance, I enjoy dreaming, so long as the oneiric life is not one of terror.  There are some interesting recurring characters my mind has developed, including one anorexic elephant who speaks with a lisp and sends me on scavenger hunts for obscure culinary items.

Okay, so by "recurring," I mean "twice."

My charming pachyderm doesn't have a name that I can recall, but he does have a cyst or something in his mouth, along with a huge, single tooth smack dab in the middle of its lower mouth (jaw?).  Clearly, I am challenged in the field of elephant anatomy but a quick read tells me that my dream very much misrepresents their dentition. Most teeth of our acquaintance originate from the top or the bottom of the mouth, but these creatures have molars that emerge from back to front.  Their tusks are considered incisors and they are without what we call "canines."

"Most teeth of our acquaintance..." -- another landmark moment in my writing history.

I was doing fine with my anorexic and thoughtful (though rather demanding) elephant until I started looking up teeth among the order Proboscidea. You'd think photos and illustrations would be helpful, but no, in this instance, I just grew more confused.  Finally, the Honolulu Zoo provided a description that cleared things up:

Think of them like a conveyor belt moving slowly from back to front. When the foremost tooth is so worn down and is of no further use, it is pushed out, mostly in pieces and replaced at the rear by a new one. An elephant grows only six complete sets of these molars during its lifetime; the final set finishes growing in at about the age of 40. This method of replacing teeth prolongs their dentition until that age. Many elephants do reach the age of 60, but few elephants reach the age of 70 because the teeth will be worn down and decayed to the point of them not being able to eat any more resulting in death by slow starvation.

It will be fun to see if my dream elephant changes now that I know his tooth is an aberration.  Good thing there were no challenges to his ability to speak English or to his love of ham and cheese sandwiches -- provided you can find the correct bit of pig, because otherwise, he would as soon do without.

Right.  Still there?

I also hope to program myself to dream something in particular.  This is a recurring effort, one that I've never completely actualized.  On several occasions, I've been able to "direct" my dreaming but only in the most general way.

What bit of directed dreaming do I hope to achieve?  Well, as usual, Fred started it all.

We ran into each other, quite literally, around midnight, in the kitchen.  (Colonel Mustard, in the Conservatory, with the Lead Pipe)

In my attempt to reconstruct how we got from Subject A to Subject H, I believe much of it stemmed from a remark I made about Dr. Greg House, lead character on the television series House.  It's not a show I watch often.  For instance, I have no idea how House ended up in prison, friendless, trading favors, mopping floors, still dispensing acerbic medical advice but claiming to no longer practice that art.  Clearly, that situation not being the premise of the show, it is a temporary thing.  Somewhere in all of that how-the-mighty-have-fallen stuff, House says something about an enduring interest in physics, and makes a passing reference to black holes.

That bit of insight into the man demanded sharing -- in the chilly kitchen at midnight.  In my defense, Fred mentioned House first, in the context of Marmy Fluffy Butt needing a diagnostician.  She is refusing to poop in any of the available litter boxes.  She will urinate therein, but daintily steps out and away to finish her proverbial business.  Having to deal with her contributions directly, Fred could not help but notice streaks of blood in her stool.  We have taken her to the vet twice, and even had a fairly extensive workup done last week, and have been repeatedly told that she's in robust health.  If she weren't such a fierce poop and pee segregationist, and if it were not for the presence of blood, we wouldn't press the issue, but we love the crazy cat.  As we were cogitating over Things Marmy, and both of us were tired, and since we were, after all, in our own darned kitchen, Fred launched into an imitation of one of those House scenes -- you know, where The Team is gathered around their Chief and a whiteboard listing the symptoms of some patient's diagnostic enigma, shouting out "it could be lupus," and suggesting a bolus of a billion milligrams of hydrocortisone.  Fred loves the "lupus" line and -- because of an intensely personal love/hate relationships with prednisone, which I have been on, almost continually, since roughly 1997 -- he always reacts to the easy mention of corticosteroids.

The vet had mentioned possibly putting Marmy on a course of steroids.  He mentioned it ONCE and I suppose our eyes bugging out and the involuntary hissing sound that flew around the cubicle stymied a second attempt.

So I didn't just say, "Fred, House is interested in physics."

There was a well-established, straight-as-a-line context.

Once apprised of Greg House's proclivities, including the black hole part, Fred decided it was the perfect time to share fascinating tidbits about theoretical physics.  My contribution for the entire rest of the conversation was this phrase, repeated:  "What I don't get is how no one ever calls them on the fact that they're constructing whole paradigms out of what is clearly *theoretical*, just hypotheses!" (Over and over and over.  I really, truly don't get it.  I mean, I can think of scads of unproven and unprovable things that are fascinating and interesting, but that won't bring me a tenured position anywhere, harrumph!)

Fred knows to include accessible anecdotes that infinitely approach whimsy when he attempts to educate me about anything beyond the Chanson de Roland, and so it was that he regaled me with a story of Einstein developing his various theories and foundational axioms (?) by imagining himself flying through the universe on a roller-coaster.  To hear Fred tell it, and I did, it was like tripping alongside the very phenomena one wants to explain. Being able to wildly coast at the speed of light and see -- well, I have no conception of what he might have seen, maybe just distortion at a more observor-friendly rate?  Like I said, I. do. not. get. it.

Of course, this bit of fluff turned into something phenomenally important when I couldn't sleep, when the pain, the chills, and the jerks set in.  When no novel could be witty, scary, or remotely interesting enough.  When peach yogurt, even, could not avert the inward gaze.  Popcorn? Don't make me laugh!

Talk about a diversion!  Me, on Einstein's roller-coaster!

But not, for me, to figure out great mysteries.  Rather, I rolled up, I rolled down, swerved left, and swerved right, all midst events I had seen mostly in photography, homely and amateurish as much as great, or by words alone, my stepmother's tales of dancing en pointe until her toes bled (in a midlength romantic tutu of black over shimmering slate gray tulle), the imperfect waltz of the Bovary, and Pliny across the bay from the erupting Mount Vesuvius, all slowed to an observable rate, directionally mine, reversible even.  The great cosmic roller-coaster ride, with the cosmos, like the emphasis, being mine.

Of course, Fred had gone on to talk of evaporation within black holes, who have their own thermodynamic laws, apparently, and of the universe conceived as a ginormous hologram, or as projection, anyway.

The last thing I actually remember, word-for-word?

"Imagine what might happen if you were cruising along in your spaceship, precisely even with the speed of light... and you turned on your headlights!"

Fred knows how to talk to silly thinkers like me.  I knew immediately what would happen to that poor soul, doubtless in possession of his spaceship operator's license for mere moments before the fickle decision to put on the brights popped into his little tiny head.

Whiplash, that's what would happen!  Pistons and gears, oil and water, futuristic unitards in a bind!

I do love Fred.  And tonight, as I prepare to dream, I'll be hoping to make wild coaster runs, maybe with my friend the anorexic elephant, who will lisp into my ears possible explanations for the wonders we'll fly through, and who may reveal what we can do to calm Marmy's gut, and my legs.  There's gonna be some major Einstein hair come morning.

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Of probable interest:  The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride by Cliff Burgess and Fernando Quevedo in Scientific American, October 14, 2007.