Electric Dreams - TheBody.com's Bulletin Boards

The expression isn’t mine, I’ve read it elsewhere, but it seems so appropriate that I borrow it for this thread.

I’ve always been a vivid dreamer, spent years noting down my nightly adventures in other realms, making indexes, comparing notes, looking for messages. There’s that blonde woman I don’t know who shows up from time to time to give me some kind of lesson; there’s the dream of walking on unstable ground, be it a sandy beach, be it a muddy path, my feet sinking in, unable to move forward without Herculean effort; there’s the feeling that I’m not going to make it on time, be it for a meeting, a flight, a journey that means much to me; there are the flying dreams that lift my spirit and color the day that follows them with optimism.

Since beginning the ARV regimen of one Truvada and one Sustiva a day, some of the dreams have become electric. The doctor asked me before beginning if I were a depressive person and I answered “No, not more than the average person who suffers the average ups and downs the average from time to time.” The first night after taking the little peach colored pill I saw faces emerge from the wall of my hospital room even before falling asleep, faces that rose up and looked at me and laughed at me. The waking hallucinations stopped after only two days, but the electric dreams occur with certain frequency.

Of course, I’ve read of others who experience these electric dreams, who believe these dreams have been brought on by the drugs they are taking to prolong their lives, drugs that seem to be keeping those opportunistic ailments at bay. I’ve read that many older men (am I an older man now? I’m only 48, but find myself in the “older VIH+” group now) are taking antidepressant drugs that help them face the new psychological challenges that being branded and taking ARVs have brought into their lives. Yet, I look at the actual dreams themselves and ask myself what they are trying to tell me. Today I only remember three that I can share, the first two are recent, from this past week, the last is of this very morning that had me waking with the feeling that no one desired me, that no one would ever desire me again as long as I live.

#1, I am one of three or four police men called to handle some situation at the entrance to a skyscraper in a large city. We are standing in front of some revolving doors and I decide that the best thing to do is to remove my uniform and wait in my underwear. Nothing happens for a moment; suddenly a group of dangerous men flow out of the building: I am frightened, I run to a neighboring set of revolving doors and try to hide behind the glass entry and I awake.
#2, I am watching children play in the street. One group is playing with firecrackers and another boy is on his bike. He rides towards the group who throw a bunch of firecrackers at his face, he nearly falls off his bike. They run to escape, he pursues them, taking a jumping ramp to fall with his bike on the leader of this group. He begins beating on this boy with his fist and I awake.
#3, I’ve gone to the dentist, the wait is long but the dentist and his aides are actors as well, I am invited to participate in the preparations for a presentation. A young man and I escape to a place under a viaduct and begin to play with one another’s penises, cars driving by can see us, he is totally excited while I am unable to get an erection, one car stops and the driver compliments him on his size and I awake. This time in tears feeling undesired for life.

I guess I am inviting others here to share their electric dreams. I don’t know if it will help, but it might. I feel I have to go further than just complaining about having these dreams and the waking feelings that go with them or even bring them about. I feel that I have to share the dreams themselves, they are part of my thoughts; though I am not looking for dream analysis, I am indeed looking for meaning in what my brain is processing when my waking beliefs are not forcing me to be cheerful, not forcing me to hide behind my excellent physical health, not obliging me to pretend that there is nothing wrong so that the people who know me and trust me don’t brand me as I feel branded by the doctor, the nurse, the press, the world at large.

I think “if only it had been cancer, at least people would have felt sorry for me”, which may not be a legitimate thought, but it is a thought anyway. While in hospital, for example, many people I know saw me wasted in the bed with tubes in my chest and wished me well, the reality was that I had pneumonia, anyone can suffer a bout of pneumonia; what would have been the reaction of these same acquaintances had they known that the pneumonia was supposedly brought on by my compromised immune system caused by that dreaded 20th century plague? I can’t say because I couldn’t be honest with them to find out, the results would probably have been horrible. The proof lies in my partner who does know and who has “rejected” me as a result. He can not see beyond the VIH to the pneumonia, he sees only the VIH.

Soooo, I invite others to share their electric dreams: maybe, when there are a few, we can better understand, each of us as individuals, what our thoughts are trying to tell us. My personal quest concerns my feelings of not being desired. My partner does not desire me. I can not expect to be desired by unknown men. I can no longer simply have irresponsible anonymous sex with the threat of bringing on the branding to another innocent person. Even if I find another person in my situation, what had been sex in the past is reduced to what it is now (no need to go into details here, it’s not the theme of this thread, heehee). Any more dreams, or thoughts?
Thanks for reading my diatribe.

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peace,
picaro.

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