These three entries are extracted from my "Matters of the Heart" article, documenting my stay at Hungtington Memorial Hospital after a severe heart attack.
Frustration #1
Strangeness:
This night there was no loud noise, and I slept, but rather strangely. Much of this I attribute to my isolation as explained above. It was divided into two sections by the arrival of one of the young ladies with a monitoring machine.In the first segment, in a dream state, I was presented with many pages from my Web site, except not from my waking Web site, and not on computer screen, but as sets of documents that could be opened up and examined. Each document, and its sub-documents had a black circular emblem with a complex design in the upper left corner, where my waking documents have colorful photos. The emblem were the same for every document. This whole sequence somehow had a very definite Japanese feel to it.
I opened documents and examined them. They seemed to be in html format. I was finding things that needed to be corrected. I started to realize I could not correct them now, because there was no method to do so, and I could only go on to the next. I could not save any information, and realized I wouldn't be able to remember any of these corrections when I left this dream state. I continued on reviewing documents until awakened for blood pressure testing.
The second section was also in a dream state with an overall Japanese feel to it. Here I was presented, similarly to the documents in the first set, bright red lozenges, about 2 inches long. At this time I was quite aware I could do nothing, so I just watched them pass.
These episodes made me very aware of what it was like for primitive humans, who had no way to preserve information except through story and song. Fortunately, they worked in a waking state and could preserve information in their minds until they could compose stories and songs. I didn't even have that, because in the dream state, each thought erased the previous one.
Frustration #2
Strangeness:
This night, in dream state, I had a very odd concept as to how sleep worked. I conceptualized it as a series of tasks to be completed going around a clock face. I had completed maybe half the tasks, but further progress was halted by a small pile of pictures blocking the clock face. Yes, once again, the strong Japanese overtone - the pictures were Japanese. I tried to move them out of the way, but couldn't.I remember only the one picture that was completely visible on the top of the pile. In the foreground there was a sand dune with patchy vegetation. Playing in the sand were a bunch of rather plump Japanese babies. In their diapers they looked like miniature sumo wrestlers. In the midrange, just down from the dune, there were trees. In the far distance, visible between clumps of trees, there was a mushroom cloud. I was given the title, "Never Again", and the name of the woman artist, but I failed to remember her name. This was at about 2:00am. I was able to reconceptualize sleep to get past the photos, but I did not sleep well the rest of the night.
Home At Last
First Task was to make the bed, as the sheets had been somewhat soiled by the initial diarrhea attack. After getting to sleep, I was delighted to have a short but normal dream time sequence with no Japanese overtones at all. It featured a minor auto accident on an almost deserted freeway.