Pain Medication and Dreaming

Being doped up on pain medication has finally affected my REM state. I seriously had one of the oddest dreams of my life last night. Now, I understand where many of the aspects of the dream came from (I'm not a believer in Freud and the whole sexual parts of dreams, I believe more that dreaming is a way for your subconscious to recycle information out of your short-term memory).

In the dream, I was living in my apartment, except it was laid out a little differently. For starters, my bathroom was much larger than this apartment. The cabinet of the bathroom seemed to connect to a laundry shoot and the person living above me could fit in the laundry shoot and then hide in my cabinet, right under where I brush my teeth.

I do not know the people who live above me (I'm on the second floor of a 3-story apartment building). All I know is that I sometimes can hear them watching loud action movies or listening to heavier rock/techno music. It's mainly bass that I hear. This does not bother me at all.

In my dream, DM was over and we were scrapbooking. My mouth was still hurting from having the wisdom tooth pulled, so I went into the bathroom to take some medication (this happened quite a bit during this last weekend). I had been hearing odd noises from the bathroom and another one occurred while I was taking the medicine. I called DM over and we opened the cabinet door.

Now I should explain, this may sound freaky, but I was not afraid in my dream at all. My dreams usually cause a calm state for me and this was no exception.

We opened the door and there was a man hiding in my cabinet. He was a young man. He was a normal sized adult, yet he fit in the cabinet. This is where I knew I was dreaming. He started talking to us. He said, "I thought it was aboot time to introduce myself." As it turned out, the laundry shoot served as a geography warp. The man living above me and hiding in my cabinet was Barrett, whom I've never met, and he had Johnny upstairs. He'd like us to met her IRL. We were getting ready to head through the laundry shoot when I realized that I had metal retainers glued to my teeth.

I decided to pull the retainers out. (I'm pretty sure this part of the dream comes from my conversation with B the other night. He mentioned the reason he was late for work (hence the reason he got fired) was because he had a retainer removed from his lower jaw and it made him sick.) They came out rather easily and I was left with just a bit of glue on the roof of my mouth. My mouth felt a million times better. It was as if there was suddenly more room for all my teeth and my teeth were magically perfect, shiny and white. I grabbed a Kleenex to grab some excess glue (which was quite similar to the sticky stuff they use to seal scrapbooking products). The paper tissue on my mouth was a weird texture and that woke me up.

The extremely odd thing: When I woke up, my mouth felt better. I'm not having any pain from the wisdom tooth removal any longer. My jaw is still a little sore to the touch, but not bad. This was a strange dream.

Makes sense that I would dream that Barrett and Johnny were nearby. DM and I spoke often this weekend about how we miss Johnny and hope she's having a good time with Barrett. I'm pretty sure her trip is nearing an end and I feel sad about that. I wish I could make it so she could visit him longer. I hope that she's having a good time. I'm also still hoping for the best with her friend, Uzi.

I guess the pain medication didn't make me have nightmares, but it did affect my dreams. Just a bit odd.