I had a dream

JON (with apologies to Dr King and Wobbly Williams…): One of the better aspects of having Parkinson’s is that the drugs are fairly effective. Okay, I’ll never be an Olympic athlete, but if I take my 26 or so pills per day (yes, I rattle when I walk) then I am fairly functional most of the time.

At bedtime, I take a couple of Rivotril which work both as muscle relaxants against my leg cramps and, probably more importantly, are pretty effective against my REM sleep disorder. You may recall this from posts past, but to recap: during REM sleep, “normal” people’s brains switch off their bodies to only the eyes move when you dream – hence the name Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. This switching off doesn’t always work if you have Parkinson’s.

What you get then is vivid dreams that you act out, with much loud talking, thrashing about in bed, and possibly sleep walking. I did all of this before I got on Rivotril. The dreams all followed a similar pattern, where I was protecting someone or something from a serious threat. Thus, I have been Obama’s body guard, have performed life saving surgery and been engaged in child protection. All important and rather stressful stuff, particularly in the middle of the night.

At least I have never attacked Marie in my sleep, though it is apparently fairly common for the REM sleep disorderly to have a go at their bed partners. On the other hand, always keen to take the path less traveled by, I incorporated extreme bed wetting into my routine – not of the incontinent variety, mind you, but where I would get out of bed, carefully position myself and then treat the mattress as a urinal. The wet would eventually wake me and I would then slink off and wake Marie so she could deal with the mess. Not a happy time for either of us.

However, this is all a few years back (it’s taken a while to get ready to talk about it). I still occasionally get vivid dreams, but instead of acting them out I now wake up, go for a wee (in the right place) and then back to my own bed – which is mine alone as I twitch and snore and need the full width of the double bed to turn over at night, so sharing isn’t really a sane option any more. Last night was a bit different, though, in that instead of waking up properly I went into Marie’s bedroom. And the conversation went as follows:

Jon: We have to talk.
Marie: What about?
Jon: Don’t be alarmed, but I really think we have to let the slaves go
Marie: What slaves?

It was only at this point that I woke and realized I’d been dreaming. Since there seemed very little point in continuing the conversation, I just went back to bed (though I did check under the bed and can confidently state that our house is entirely slave free).