Metoprolol Dreams

I used to get migraines. The kind that would start with a flickering light in the corner of my peripheral vision, then spread across my view until I couldn't see anything. Suddenly, the "auras" would go away, but be quickly followed by that crushing, debilitating, all-encompassing pain that my fellow migraine sufferers know all too well. I could lose up to three whole days because of them, and had them as often as every ten days.

Thanks to my doctor, I am now on beta-blockers as a preventative measure against these gnarly headaches. It has worked wonders, since (knock on wood) I haven't had a full-blown one since I started the treatment. It has also helped my slightly high blood pressure, which is a lovely side-effect. But, one other effect of the medicine is listed on WebMD simply as "unusual dreams". Unusual. The makeup of my dreamscape since starting this medicine could be described far more vividly than just "unusual"... for everynight, my mind switches gears, and takes an acid-like trip into Metoprolol Dreams.

There, you will not find the classic nightmarish fodder of falling, running in slow motion or being naked in your high-school chemistry classroom. In this warped, parasomnial world, dreams are so well defined in their structure and visuals that you would swear they were truly real. I once was able to wake, boot-up my computer in the next room, and transcribe an entire dream (verbatim) into a short-story about a boy whose dream-self is a spectre who decimates a small town in his dreams every night. That was over ten months ago, and rereading it now, it still holds up as a solid story with dramatic promise.

In these dreams, I rarely find the nonsensical worlds of elephants eating donuts as they fly spaceships to New Jersey during rush-hour. These dreams have such a powerful reality to them, that I sometimes have real problems snapping out of them when I awake. As annoying as this is, it's very rare. But it sure gives me pause to think about the subconscious mind's hold on our reality.

No matter what Burtonesque world I visit at night, I still wake each morning happy that I am healthier for the treatment I am now on. So until they can develop a new drug, I guess my mind will take the nightly journey into an unknown world where the borders between fantasy and reality are blurred to the point that you almost can tell the difference between the two. Peace...