I took a nap this afternoon. I usually remember my dreams when i nap during the afternoon, and they're usually pretty wild and weird. Today I had one that was really sad and distressing and very, very vivid. The most awful thing was that my lovely husband was nowhere to be found in any of this, and I had to bear it all myself.

I was wandering the halls of my old dorm, and walk by the door of my apartment. Some guy had exited the apartment, and we greeted awkwardly as we passed each other. I entered the dorm.

It wasn't at all like my old dorm. It resembled an actual apartment, one that I've never seen before in my waking life. It looked fully furnished and lived-in, and I set about settling back in for my evening. I came to realize that I didn't recognize any of the items in the apartment, and I didn't think much of it at first. It was my apartment after all! I lived alone i my apartment, and I had left it something of a mess. Don't mind that there was a baby carrier in the side room.

I finally realized something was wrong when I went to the lower-floor of the apartment and saw a little TV stationed by some chairs, with bags of snacks clearly situated so that TWO people were eating from them. All at once I realized I was not in my own apartment and I needed to get out of there. How could I not realize this wasn't my apartment? Where was I? Why was I in here at all? This wasn't even my old dorm building at all!

As I returned upstairs to the front room, I saw that the apartment residents had come back with security. I explained that I didn't know why I was in their home, and that my assumption I should be there must have been some kind of delusion. It felt like I had lapsed into someone else's life that I had invented right there on the spot. The lady of the house agreed that I must be delusional, and the dream sequence moved along.

Next, I found myself in a hospital waiting room lobby. My mother was about to arrive to pick me up, and I was holding a few boxes of medicine that were supposed to help with my short-term memory loss. I realized that I didn't recall how I got there or whether I had actually seen the doctor yet, and so I asked a few nearby nurses "should I be able to remember anything before just now?"

They smiled condescendingly and stated, "Yes, the medicine should already be helping your short-term memory loss, and you have already seen the doctor." I told them that I didn't actually remember anything between being in the apartment where I was found, and the moment just before I spoke to them. They smiled again, but their smiles were so large and toothy that it betrayed their worry and confusion they were trying to hide from me. "Make sure you've taken your medicine, it won't work if you don't take it."

I looked into the box in my lap, wrapped in a thin layer of cellophane that I had evidently breached some time earlier. The dose was sill in the box, and I examined it for a moment before I picked it out of its container. It looked and tasted like a yoghurt candy with shitty dried fruit suspended inside, slightly hollow in the center. It was shaped like an over-large cherry. There were two colors, baby blue (ever so slightly purple-tinted), and a pinkish red, both washed-out by the color of the yoghurt.

I didn't ask, but I assumed one of the colors was for daytime, and the other color was for night time. I chewed on the sickeningly-bland blue yoghurt cherry treat, not reading the instructions or asking for assistance. The nurses didn't assist, so I decided I had made the right decision. I identified the dried fruits as little pucks of once-had-been-blueberries. I hated it, but I chewed through it. The box contained a number of doses, enough for a week at least.

Suddenly I was in the passenger seat in my mother's car and what followed was a terrifying drive home. The local highways were totally reshaped and the landscape did not resemble what I knew existed in real life. Not only that but the work crews had not blocked off the old bad roads from the new bad roads, and my mother was being her usual speed-demon driving self and wound up taking the car off the road several times due to the absolute chaos of driving freeway-speeds on unfamiliar roads. At one point we found ourselves back at the hospital for some reason, as if the dream was refusing to let me move on.

Apparently I experienced another memory lapse and found myself at home. My mother had managed to take me back, and we were talking about what happened and how I had lost my sense of place, why I found myself in someone else's apartment, etc. I didn't have any answers. I experienced several more memory lapses in between rather uneventful, meandering dream sequences that I can't quite recall. Suffice to say a lot of dream time passed, perhaps months, and I found myself sitting in my basement, in from of the piano, staring at the wall to my left. The sun was setting through the windows, casting a patter of shadow and golden, glowing light on the wall.

All I wanted was to remember my life up to that point. All I wanted was to be here, in the present, continuously, and to not suddenly find myself somewhere else, several hours or even weeks into the future, with no memory of the intervening time.

The sun setting on the wall suddenly reminded me of prison bars, and I began to despair.

Then I woke up.

Fuck you, brain, that really really sucked.