Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I had a dream that I missed my train to London today and it was fine.

Almost disappointed to wake up with my alarm, in plenty of time.

I was briefly tempted to just stay in bed...

Now, on my train back to Manchester 12 hours later, with two hours left to go before I get home, I can say with certainty that I could've stayed home and it would have been fine.

I woke up at 3:30 this morning, from a body-horror type nightmare that left me fighting with the duvet I was tangled up in, and breathing heavily.

I was so tired that I did get back to sleep and the dreams I remember after that weren't that bad but were stressful, confusing, exhausting. (One of the few plot points I distinctly remember is that I was failing for the second time to get a train to Argentina for work, something I was expected to do and get back in a day (from somewhere in North America, but still!).)

And my award when my alarm went off was that I had to go to work. I felt very strongly that I needed another night's sleep to make up for the previous one first. But I didn't trust my brain to make it any pleasanter if I did fall back asleep, so I also kinda didn't want to stay in bed. I was both unprepared and unmotivated to start the day, but out of sheer habit managed to drag myself through meds and clothes and tooth-brushing, through opening curtains and emptying the dishwasher and making breakfast.

I really miss having a dog in the mornings. I'm on my own for a couple hours now and I'm lonesome.

Work proved more challenging and miserable than I'd expected so I was relieved for the break I got when my phone rang, although it rings so seldom I didn't recognize the noise at first. And I didn't recognize the number but it was local so I answered it.

Like I said I grew up around dogs but I never before Had A Dog in the way I had Gary so it never occurred to me that someone was going to call me and tell me that we have to go to a place to collect what is left of him, but of course they were going to. She actually said "Gary is back with us," which was clearly a very practicedly tactful phrase. It looks weird now I write it out but it felt nice at the time; when I texted the others to pass on the news I said something like "Gary's ashes" but I'm kinda glad she didn't. I'm not normally sensitive to words for what happens to the bodies in death but I think it's just nice to hear Gary being talked about in the present tense at all.

I put the phone down not knowing how I'd react to this, but I just texted the others and went back to work. It made V weepy again though. I noticed they've also found more stuff of his today and dealt with it -- more laundry has been done including his harness and blanket that will be kept in the memory box, the dog-shampoo bottle is in the recycling bin now, that kind of thing. I'm not avoiding that stuff on purpose, I'm not too emotional or anything I'm just so tired. I'm grateful they're doing this work but hope it isn't draining all their spoons.

We initially planned to go get him after work, but I was soon worried that V was looking too tired for the planned trip to the cinema this evening and by the time D and I actually finished work they were too tired for either. And I didn't fancy a movie that started after 8pm when I'd been wanting to go to sleep since about 8am.

I miss D but he's excited to see Nosferatu and he'll be having a great time, and the best time I could have tonight is basically what I did: quietly read a book, lift some weights (trying to get my pent-up restless energy out; I'm all out of sorts without my dog-management routines) and have a shower before bed.

New plan is to go pick up the ashes tomorrow. When we still expected to do it today, I wrote out a thank-you card for them as well as one for his regular vet (which we'll also be visiting soon to drop off some of his stuff that Dogs Trust couldn't take the other day...or that we'd forgotten about or hadn't been washed yet the other day!). I'm rarely at a loss for words but I didn't know what to say; everything feels inadequate and rambly.

Like this blog entry, really.

I was almost glad to hear my alarm this morning because it woke me up from an absolutely appalling dream. The kind where you find yourself back among people from your past who've hurt you, and try to explain how they hurt you, and... it doesn't go well. The kind you make notes for your next counseling session about after ruminating on it as you get dressed. The kind that leaves you rattled and tired in ways that last all day.

At least I was dragging myself up into a sunny morning and a gentle work day.

I feel like I sleepwalked my way through work, including ignoring Gary a lot as he squeaked about the other two humans being missing for a couple hours in the middle of the day. But also I fed him and myself and took him out for so many little walks that we were outside when the car returned with our humans and he had his usual charming and funny moments of realization that they were back.

I got a very annoying text saying my testosterone level was too high the last time it was tested, so I am not free yet of needles every couple months (if this one had been okay, I could go 6 months until the next one!!!). I don't even know if the level actually is high; They always tell me the gel has to be applied 4-6 hours before the blood test but my GP only does blood tests in the morning! Sorry I'm bad at waking up at 4-5am to take my fucking meds. I'd never get back to sleep knowing the prospect of needles was hanging over my morning, what a grim day that would be!

I needed a nap after work, and I'm so incapable of napping that this is never a good sign -- it usually only happens when I'm sick! I slept fine (in terms of amount of sleep if not quality of sleep...) so it's frustrating to still be in this state.

I had to be woken up for dinner, struggled to eat it, and have just felt bad this whole time. Somewhat mitigated by a Wednesdoof playing many Doof classics as people get excited for a festival that's an anchor of the Doof calendar.

D comes downstairs to make tea while I'm in the kitchen making tea (this is such a sleepy household).

He gives me a hug and a kiss and then says "Not a pillow!"

I am concerned. "What."

He laughs and says "You haven't seen my latest toot have you?"

I flap my arms dramatically. "Well, now I'm even more concerned!" Most of what he says on Mastodon is puns and shitposts so them being about me doesn't seem like a great sign.

He showed me on his phone. Turns out he had a dream about kissing me and woke up snogging a pillow.

I was expecting worse, that is just too funny.

He wasn't even sleeping in my room last night! Glad he missed me. Even if he also missed me in his attempts to snog me and got the pillow instead.

This evening I had a phone call with an artist who's working on an installation,

a virtual reality experience constructed from sound and image.

In undulating bubbles around an abandoned bus, visitors discover the voices of blind and partially sighted "witnesses” who share their personal experiences and truths. This is the testimony of the missing passengers, and a platform for their voices to be heard.

So my voice was recorded to be part of this. I'm not an artist so I'm excited to be Participating in an Art!

Of course the thing will be in London. But I do have to go there a couple times in October so I'm hoping one of those will line up with this because I would like to see it (or, hear it; he told me the VR setup includes sound cues as well as visual cues to lead people to the points where the snippets of recordings will be).

He asked me three questions:

1. How would you describe the experience of being a blind or partially-sighted person? You may want to include descriptions of daily activities, or other senses, that bring your experiences to life for the listener.

2. What is the most important piece of information that you would like to communicate to sighted people about the challenges of living in a majority sighted world?

3. Have your dreams been affected by being a blind or partially-sighted person and, if so, in what ways? Please include any examples of dreams you remember. If you prefer, you could also talk about the way you, as a blind or partially-sighted person, imagine things.

I talked about how I'd gained sight rather than lost it, my optic nerves, what my nystagmus is like, my journey from a medical-model upbringing to discovering and embracing the social model in adulthood, and for the last question didn't talk much about how I literally dream because I don't have anything to say about that, but talked about a recurring anxiety dream I had for many years, because I think it's related to me being partially sighted.

In the dream, I'm a passenger in a car and I suddenly realize the driver has disappeared. The car is still zooming along though and I somehow manage to climb into the empty driver's seat without affecting that. Then I have to drive, or just steer really (it's definitely an automatic I'm "driving"!), speeding along freeways/motorways full of other cars. It's never a quiet road or a two-lane highway. Always a big speedy road, often in a city, often at night with the other cars just blobs of headlights and taillights.

My dream-self has knuckles that are white from how hard I'm gripping the steering wheel, and a stomach that's churning. I weave in and out around other cars in traffic, constantly certain I'm going to crash the car. But I never do.

The dream just goes on and on like this -- not getting easier but also not getting so difficult that I crash -- until I wake up.

I remember once being almost as frustrated as relieved that I was just about managing to keep the car going, because it was so stressful and scary and tiring and my only reward for "success" here was having to do more of the same terrifying task that was being somehow asked of me.

It all sounds like a really heavy-handed metaphor, but also I'm not surprised that driving a car is how my brain chose to illustrate this so many times because it does seem like a terrifying responsibility, and I'm constantly admiring of anyone who's willing to drive me anywhere.

This opportunity to contribute to the Arts had caught my eye because of the mention of public transport in the title; I always look out for stuff like that, since it can be relevant to my job at times. But here, there was no other mention of it. The questions weren't about that at all, as you can see, which I think is interesting. Fair enough that what is going on inside strangers' heads on a bus might have little or nothing to do with the bus at all.

Or anywhere: I remember distinctly having this revelation when I was a kid: in a car on a freeway as it happens, but this was being safely driven by my dad. I was in the backseat, and I cannot remember if we were going out or coming back home, but I was either excited about or basking in whatever we'd done on that particular trip (Twins game, Disney on Ice, something like that). I remember looking at other cars in the next lane, especially when traffic was slow enough that I could see inside them. Other kids, their strange blankets and toys cluttering up their own backseats, unknown adults driving, often I couldn't see anything inside the car and only knew if it was blue or red, big or little, going the same or opposite direction...

Suddenly I realized the people in all those cars didn't know we'd just been to Disney on Ice or were excited about the upcoming Twins game or whatever, and that meant I also didn't know where they were going or why. Were they on longer or shorter trips than us? Was it fun like this or scary like when I had to go to hospitals? I had no idea. It was dizzying, how little I knew. And I would never know. There was no way to know.

I spent a lot of car journeys after that making up stories about the people in the other cars we went past.

Anyway, back to tonight! The artist seemed happy with my answers, I have no idea what he'll make of them and I'm terribly interested to find out.

I don't read stuff written about blind people directed for a general audience very often, and when I do it's only when I feel like seeing how terrible it is.

This is such a terrible article. It's very binarist about blindness/sightedness, it's very sighted-gaze, it's very dull.

Until the last few sentences, which I wish had citations so I could use them for my work, which is trying to make transport and streets better for blind people.

Research has found that blind people have more dreams about travel that involve unfortunate circumstances. Some of these dreams could potentially be considered nightmares. One hypothesis is that the nightmare content may mirror the difficulties blind people face while getting around in their waking life.

Huh. Until the pandemic, most of my nightmares were about travel, usually on planes. But I'm only one person, one data point.

I wonder if there's any truth to the barriers we experience in our journeys are so profound that they populate our nightmares.

I've been thinking about this for many days, since I first saw this terrible article.

I spent this morning feeling overwhelmed by a bunch of little things, most of which I'd let slide before the weekend away, but one or two new/developing ones too.

My volunteering is a Lot at the moment, I tried to apply for a job and for technical reasons I'm not even sure if it worked, work is being very demanding... There's just so much happening.

And I felt really unsettled and then realized that while there were a couple of emails I could send or texts I could reply to, a lot of it is just up in the air now and waiting on other people and there's nothing I could do. So I had this real "I'm failing, I'm not doing stuff" feeling that ended up mostly being incorrect. I can't do the stuff. Which is differently frustrating but did help to realize.

Last week I had a weirdly vivid dream (this will be relevant in a minute I promise, bear with me) being in a restaurant with Stuart and some other people, where the person taking our order was being really ableist towards him: pretending to misunderstand him and getting him so flustered that his ability to communicate really did suffer just as she had been pretending it did. (And then even though I challenged this on the spot, she also pretended to misunderstand me when I accidentally said "French toast" instead of "French bread"!) I dreamed about making a detailed complaint to a manager.

I woke up from this musing that this seems to be a thing lately: dreaming both disability discrimination and then me raising hell about it.

And this seems as good a way as any to say, without giving away anyone else's private information, that an occurrence that very same day was different in every detail yet underlyingly similar in this "someone I love has been discriminated against, let's go!" way. So this evening when I got home from work I helped mother_bones with a phone appointment, which went well but was still exhausting.

To celebrate getting through that, I made the broccoli halloumi thing for dinner, which was perfect because we all love it so it was like a little treat, and it's incredibly easy (especially because this time I had pre-chopped broccoli florets! so it was even quicker to throw together).

The day is definitely ending better than it began. Gary went so abruptly from being completely mithery to just curling up in his crate that it was like someone had flipped a switch in his brain, and we watched another episode of Watch Out for the Big Grrrls -- only the one, though. It's taking us forever to get through this eight-episode series because not only do we all have to be in the same room at the same time (something Gary often doesn't allow in the evenings!), we have to all be in the mood for Emotions at the same time, and we have to talk about it afterward to decompress. For all I like TV being ignoreable background noise, I love this kind of thing where it feels like a real Event.

I woke up at 4am from a dream where I'd been furiously composing an email.

The email was in reply to one telling me that I couldn't have a job I'd applied for because it involved a lot of travel and the hiring person thought I couldn't do it if I'm blind.

I didn't really apply for a job that involves a lot of travel (I looked at one, at the same time I applied for a different one I haven't heard back about!) but I'm not surprised my brain spliced these together with at least one job I did get that I had to fight occupational health about, because they said I probably couldn't do it because I was blind. (I fought that and I won and I did that job well for a couple of years.)

(That's also where I got the story of someone tying my shoe for me, without asking or even telling me she was going to do it. I had noticed that the shoe had become untied while we were speaking, and figured it'd be bad manners to look away to fix it immediately, it'd make me seem distracted or uncaring about this conversation about whether I could start my job as planned and thus whether I'd get a paycheck before even more of our bills were overdue. Makes me laugh to think that I was worried about seeming rude to someone who was about to treat me like a toddler; being rude seems to have never crossed her mind! To put it mildly. But, I digress.)

Anyway, the email I was furiously typing in my dream mentioned both that I'd had a job that involved traveling around the country before and I'd done it fine (true) and that Access to Work exists to help make things like this easier at no cost to the employer (also true) and when I woke up grumpy about this I was also amused that I'm having dreams about shit like employment discrimination and Access to Work. How boring am I!

I dreamed last night that my grandma lived in a very English house, a terrace I think was in Moss Side. A bunch of family went to visit her, including two of my cousins who aren't actually wheelchair users but were in the dream. (They had no trouble getting in or around the house, that's how you know it was a dream!)

My grandma and my mom were upset that there weren't enough chairs for everyone, even though there were since my cousins had their wheelchairs. I kept trying to tell my mom and grandma "but there are enough! look!" but they seemed to completely refuse to acknowledge the existence of the wheelchairs at all, even to the extent that they ignored me talking about them.

I had just enough time to think, in the dream, how typical it is of my family to ignore things that make them uncomfortable (which the unavoidable existence of disability absolutely does), even when it's to such an extent that it causes them distress because it's led them to manufacture a problem that doesn't actually exist.

I am drastically underslept, I had a horrible nightmare and dragged myself out of it to, yay a world where nothing bad has happened to my dog (I gave him extra cheese and paid him extra attention this morning just because I was so happy that nothing bad had happened to him) but, boo, it was five o'clock in the goddam morning.

I didn't get back to sleep. I did get a stomachache. I really don't want to go to work but I'm already going to miss my other "long day" this week so at one point lying awake in bed I was wondering how I could make myself okay with working and...

...then I remembered I can start getting the bus to work today. We talked about it, this was the plan.

So that's how I, notorious hater of buses -- so much so that it made me an official volunteer campaigner to get bus drivers to treat blind people better -- ended up in tears at the thought of being able to get a bus today.

Tears of, admittedly, sleep deprivation and long-standing stress. But also of relief and gratitude, honestly.

(Also tears of frustration, that governments made choices that allowed things to get this bad and stay this bad so I haven't been on a bus in 14 months and some people won't even be able to feel as safe as I do now for goddam years yet. I'm torn between "who the fuck am I to be relatively safe, I'm no better than the people suffering more, why should I have what they don't?" and then pulling back from my own depressive mode to my favorite thing: policy. Why should any of us be suffering unnecessarily like this.)