The dream had something to do with my panic pills. That’s what I call the anxiety pills that I have to take once in a while: Panic Pills. I usually wait too long to take them, since the escalation of symptoms is subtle. So I waste some hours of the day walking it off, waiting for the blood pressure to come back to earth and the senseless spiral of direcetionless tremors to abate.

I’ve had a few incidents where the pills got smashed to bits, or I dropped them onto a dirty floor and in my very selective show of cleanliness I consider them unusable. Those incidents are few and far between (I can only think of two occurrences) but they were memorable for making me feel like some kind of junkie who panics over the status of his freakin’ pills. I don’t know if these pills have genuinely saved my life but it feels like it at times.

This dream felt real enough that I had to check on the pills upon waking up and, later, remembering the dream. In the dream I woke up at 4am and felt I should take a pill, even though I had been drinking. These pills + booze could kill a person, as I accidentally discovered earlier this year when taking a slightly different pill with a longer half life and drinking the next day. The following day was as bad as any I can remember. Head felt like it had swords pressed through it, I had trouble walking, and everything just felt like death warmed over.

So in the dream I don’t remember now if I took pills or not. I don’t think I did. But thinking now about the scenario of waking up in a stupor and taking pills just for gits and shiggles is enough to make me put those pills away from the bedside. I guess they never had any particular reason for being there in the first place except for when I take ½ of one to get to sleep. The dream also had me getting some of the pills soaked in water, making the unusable, and freaking out a little bit on account of it. There was that junkie feeling again.

I have three bottles for the pills, just to keep them organized. One bottle I carry with me everywhere. It has three or four pills, I think, probably 5 or 6 months old. This other one, formerly at the bedside, has 4½ pills of the same vintage. The last bottle, the most recent one, has 30. I also carry one pill in a keychain fob, though that one may be so old that I might as well discard it. It might be over two years old by now.

I wish I did not need them but I do. I don’t like relying on anything but the enviable gift of my body’s natural desire and ability to be healthy and heal. But sometimes the mind has other ideas.