as small as a world and as large as alone, Once upon a time, I was in great pain. None of my...

4:40am October 13, 2014

Once upon a time, I was in great pain. None of my medications would touch it. It was creeping up on a nine on the pain scale. Not a number I throw around lightly, I have enough neuropathic pain including trigeminal neuralgia, to know what ten means. I could barely move and was right on the edge of delirium. Then, seemingly miraculously, I dropped off to sleep.

I slept with the full awareness that my body was in immense pain. Yet I felt no pain in the dream. It was as if something was telling me, “Enjoy this. Appreciate what you have, right now. I am giving you a break. It won’t last forever but it will renew you for the next round of pain.”

I spent the entire dream exploring a city. Just walking around exploring. That had been one of my favorite activities before I’d been bedridden. Just walking around exploring. In the dream, I did not tire, I did not get bored, I wandered around in a state of bliss and gratitude for what I had. You can’t be grateful for lack of pain if you don’t know that you’re in severe pain as you speak, and somehow through the sleep process you’re not feeling it. Even though such pain has been known to wake you up from dreams before.

The color of the sky in the dream was, uniformly, the glowing blue you see close to the building in the first picture. That’s why I took that picture when I was out tonight. There’s also a little of it in the second picture.

I woke up from that dream and was immediately hit by a wave of pain, but I also felt happy, refreshed, and able to cope with anything the pain could throw at me. And I was able to handle it until the pain subsided.

I have recurring nightmares about the house I grew up in. Sometimes there’s people but often it’s just the house. I hated that house and took any opportunity, no matter how dangerous or ill-conceived, to get away from it. It was one factor in two separate decisions to go off to college when I was not ready. It was the reason I moved out on my own, not particularly young for a neurotypical, but certainly younger than my brothers, who were both far better equipped to live on their own than I was. I knew that if I stayed in that house, I would end up in a mental institution again. Something about the place has always rubbed me the wrong way.

This is the house in San Jose, mind you. Not Campbell. We lived in Campbell for a couple years when I was little. But this new place, it was in a pocket of San Jose surrounded on almost all sides by Campbell. So out mailing address was Campbell but our physical address was San Joss and we voted in San Jose elections. We had to count down houses from the side of the street to figure out what school district we were in, and my brothers went to two separate high schools.

So when I moved to Vermont, my nightmares about institutions stopped immediately, only to be replaced by nightly, horrible nightmares about the house. It felt like the house was telling me I’d never get away from it, which sounds silly in real life but creepy as hell in a dream. I learned to leave the house the moment I recognized I was dreaming. Sometimes I’d be able to make my escape, other times the dreams tricked me: I would be surrounded by houses just like that one. Or I would spend the rest of my dream running through my life. I felt like Arnold Rimmer when his subconscious tormented him in games that were supposed to give you your deepest desires. Except my subconscious, if it’s not just a. Figment of Freud’s imagination, does not hate me. But it definitely felt like being pitted against an actual intelligence.

One night I had a dream I was in the backyard of the house. It felt different this time. There was a shrine in one corner of the yard, and I was encouraged to pray for guidance at the shrine. So I did. Soon, I was getting “lessons” in how to take on the various obstacles the house threw in my way, from stupid horror movie tricks that would only work on a sleeping person, to more sophisticated psychological horror.

Anyway, as I was learning these things, I looked up. The sky was the same exact shade of blue.

I don’t know what I believe about anything watching over me. But I have a feeling if there were, it would be like this: it would never talk to me directly, it would stand in the background and give only as much help as I needed in order to help myself. And in this case, I Imagine, it’s heavily associated with one particular shade of blue. I have come to love that shade. It’s not just this shade of blue itself. It’s the fact that it always looks backlit. Like after the best sunsets and before the best sunrise. In fact I have come to love this twilight shade of blue, more than I love the most spectacular sunrise or sunset.

Sometimes — often — I visit the redwoods in my mind. I’m still fully aware of my physical surroundings, this is not an out of body experience. But I can bring the redwoods to me, or bring myself to the redwoods. I can be in bed and curled up at the baser of the Mother Tree, at once.

Whenever I do this, the sky is always that perfect shade of blue.

This is one reason I love lapis lazuli. It captures that shade of blue pretty well. Well enough for me to carry around a lapis lazuli ball at all times so I can be reminded of all this beauty in the world. I pull it out and remember I am never, ever alone.

TL;DR: I love this shade of blue because it shows up in my best dreams ever, and seems to be associated with goodness and love and a very hands-off style of protection. I keep a lapis lazuli ball in my pocket to remind myself that I’m not alone, ever. Other rocks have similar meanings to me, but lapis lazuli is the only one that recalls that shade of glowing twilight blue.