Lamictal 300: Depressed Mood and a Really Bad Dream

This morning I'm fighting sadness and a depressed mood.  I've taken my meds, I'm eating breakfast, I'm sitting in front of my therapy lamps like a good mental patient.  But still depressed.

My mood trouble was brought on my a bad dream, which is unusual for me.  I have plenty of dreams that are weird or scary; lately I've had a long string of them in which, despite the varied content of the rest of the dream, I am escaping a city on fire.  Rarely do they continue to bother me after I wake up.

I think this one is a problem because it hit a little close to home.  My biggest fear is that I will be rejected for my mental health problems.  Maybe my friends will be scared or uncomfortable and stop talking to me (they haven't).  Maybe my partner will leave me because I'm just too crazy (he hasn't).  Or maybe word will get out somehow, and I'll be judged by strangers -- people will look askance, mothers will pull their kids close to them as I walk down the street, and I'll never find work again!

Yes, I have a dramatic imagination.

In my dream, I was in some sort of group (in jail?  On a package tour?  Both? I couldn't tell) and a good friend of mine was there.  The guard/tour guide (who was armed) announced that since I had been psychotic he would have to bound hand and foot to a metal bar.  I was tied up in dead lift position, bent forward with my ankles and wrists shackled to a bar in front of me, as if I were about to do a dead lift with a barbell (this at least makes sense since my dead lift form has been kicking my ass lately).

But how had the guard known anything about my mental health history?  I didn't know any of the other people in the group ... I looked around and realized my friend Kris was there.  She avoided my gaze, as if guilty and frightened.  She had ratted me out.  She thought I was dangerous.Then the group was led onto a passenger train.  I was still ted up, but thanks to Dream Logic could nonetheless move around comfortably, so I found my friend and asked he why she had told the guard something so private.  She looked away and told me that she thought I was unpredictable, possibly violent, and that he needed to know about me.  It was for the safety of everyone else in the group, she said.

In keeping with more Dream Logic, our friend Janet suddenly showed up out of the blue.  Janet is a doctor, and had also been told of my condition; she asked me a bunch of patronizing questions and responded to everything I said with patronizing half-answers.  I tried to explain that I'd only had one episode; it was almost a year ago; I had posed no threat to myself or anyone else.  She smiled condescendingly, as one would to a child, and told me it was for my own good.

The passenger train passed by a number of beautiful old stone buildings with the windows bricked in.  The tour guide explained that they were abandoned.  Nonetheless, someone had taken the time to make lovely, intricate Celtic knots with the brickwork.  And belying his statement that the structures were abandoned, we passed a building where one floor had people living on it -- and they were being evicted so the windows could be bricked in.

At the end of the journey we came to a swimming pool that reminded me of some of the beautiful public baths from the late 19th century.  This image of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco show the slides, the diving boards, and some of the seven different pools -- one fresh water, six salt water -- that were kept at different temperatures.

Image courtesy of efliv's Flickr stream, shared under CC license

 

Despite my protests that I had spent years on the swim team, that I had worked for years as a life guard, that I had in fact taught aquatic safety to numerous Girl Scouts, my friends wouldn't let me swim.  The proprietor told me it was "for my own good".



In real life, Kris and Joan are close friends whom I've known since middle school.  They would never betray my trust.  Kris, in fact, knows what happened last winter; she was concerned and offered to help.  Joan is a doctor.  As such she would absolutely respect my confidentiality.  She would make sure I was getting the best care possible.  She would never patronize.  The only reason she doesn't know about my 'sode is that she lives on the other coast, is busy with a medical practice and three year old twin boys, and we only communicate via Facebook these days.

I guess this dream gets at my deepest fears.  Lack of understanding.  Rejection.  Exposure and non-consensual disclosure.  How to navigate a neurotypical world as someone with learning disabilities and a major mental illness.  Never being seen as a competent adult. 

Of course it's depressing.