…when placed under stress.

Life’s been very busy of late, as my wife’s been away a lot due to serious volunteer commitments. It doesn’t help these are commitments that require a certain amount of confidentiality and circumspection – there’s stuff she can’t talk about outside her committee. She disappears and has adventures, and I don’t know much beyond vague generalities. This is tough on both of us, because if there’s one thing we do a lot of, it’s talking about stuff. Not being able to do so is hard on us.

It’s been rough. Lots of mental stress. I joke about how this whole business must kind of be like what it feels like to having a partner engage in infidelity (no offense meant to folks who have experienced this) without bothering to hide it. Of course my joking is kind of out of desperation, because there’s a kernel of truth to the feeling, if not the actual situation.

Make sense?

My brain is doing strange things with all the extra stimulation. Playing out scenarios in my subconscious. I’m having dreams, I think to help me process things.

So, the dream I had last night that involved my spouse leaving me, makes a certain amount of sense in context. I think some even deeper layer of my subconscious understood what was happening, and softened the blow so I didn’t wake up in sorrow and horror.

That theory is all well and good, but it doesn’t do much to explain all the dragons or the pizza delivering monkey*.

Yeah.

_______________________

* –seriously. Monkey, or maybe some sort of higher ape. I don’t remember whether he had a tail or not. I don’t think it was important. Still, he had a little uniform, and a car, and carried pizza boxes around, hung out at the pizza stand between deliveries. That part of the whole business is remarkably lucid. If I knew why that was, perhaps we’d all have a much greater understanding of the universe.