| It's late at night, probably around midnight, as I
speed toward an unspecified destination along the gently curving road.
The taste of impetus is heavy in the air, and i steer the car automatically
past approaching headlights, and now fading brake lights in the rear view.
My thoughts are focused on arriving to take care of whatever so demands
my attention at the end of my journey. Perhaps I should be paying more
notice to the road, I think, approaching a slightly tighter curve on a
slight downgrade. I'm going a little fast for this road. Maybe more than
a little, comes the more fevered thought, and I brake and try to slow.
I had no idea I was going this fast, and now I'm pumping the brakes so
they won't lock. I can feel the first signs of a skid coming on and I begin
to worry -- can I stay on this side of the road? Will I be able to stay
on the road at all? I see a new pair of approaching headlights from
around the curve, raising the stakes and lowering my odds. My sense of
intense purpose now gone, destination forgotten, I begin to panic. My internal
thoughts of surrender and tell-tale signs of failure surge in to replace
them. Processing too fast to be words or phrases, my mind settles on approximate
math to represent the desperate situation. The car starts sideways. Two
seconds till I lose control. Other car is here in 3.5 seconds. 40 + 60
= 100mph. The street, 50 feet wide. I'm only turning 2 degrees a second...slowing
5mph per second...the curve is much stronger, too strong. My mind examines
what the figures will be in half a second, 1 second, 1.5 seconds, and the
irrefutable results at 2 seconds. At about 1.9 seconds...I wake up
screaming, heart pounding.
It was really 5:20am, morning sunlight leaking through the curtains. I was calming myself down, rolled in a ball under the covers, eyes fixed thankfully on the pillow that was neither a windshield nor a steering wheel. I concentrated on changing my mental subject matter from the recent imagery, with the hope of falling asleep again. In my first thoughts, one step away from the dream, I’m musing over which is worse -- the physical pains that keep me from falling asleep, or the mental ones that wake me up like this. My heart didn’t slow down enough, and the adrenaline caused me to feel wide awake. I considered: maybe I’ll get up and do something useful. Maybe it’ll be therapeutic to express this, and have it where others can see it, like a window into my mind. These dreams only come once every week to ten days now, not so often any more, but still quite a change from the months of uninterrupted night sleep I took for granted before my real accident. My sleep has been cut by about 40% overall. A bit less than half of the cut can be attributed to dreams like this where I drive, others where I walk and re-experience the frozen moments before and slow-motion uncontrollable flight after the impact, and still others more abstract of poisonous snakes or pure night terrors. The rest can be blamed on stress or anxiety, sudden muscle spasms, neck or back pains, or pure good-old leg pain. Sometimes, while lying in a position that would have worked fine for sleep half a year ago, a leg or arm will fall asleep for no good reason, rendering me awake trying to find a configuration that will satisfy all extremities. Of course, at first, the physical left no room for the
mental. My subconscious difficulties were content to amass quietly as I
dealt with my new life and pain in three dimensions. I got to know it all,
from re-learning how to move around and learning the few positions in which
I could sleep, to the rejection of crying due to the incredible stinging
pain it caused when my salty tears inevitably hit the large tender abrasion
next to my eye. Without such commitment the tears would have come easily
as I thought of the coming months, and how my plans had now changed in
favor of a careful period of hopeful healing. Even knowing that there
have been others who had it much worse was scant comfort in the midst of
the most horrific experience of my life.
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