We’re going to stick to no tDCS and do gamma brainwave biofeedback at PZ for the forseeable future. It seems to be working better for me, although I’m still having trouble with the floaters in the dead centre of my vision. The flashes are almost gone. Last week, the floaters were like some malignant black cobweb; now they’re morphing into out-of-focus blurry spots. Makes for fun reading at times, particularly when reading print. I’m not sure why I have more trouble making out letters printed on paper than letters “printed” on a screen . . . but there you go, a new frustration in my life I just have to get used to until my brain filters out that annoying info from the optic nerve input.
I’ve discovered my biofeedback trainer excels at dream interpretation. I don’t have many dreams that I can remember. I’ve gone from vivid predictive dreams right after my brain injury to no dreams to every so often fragments to, in the last couple of months, weekly dreams I remember. I had none for eleven days previous to last week. And then I had one I remembered the entirety of. I usually recall the whole of the last part of a dream and maybe fragments of the narrative that leads to the part I email my trainer, but last week I recalled all of it.
Needless to say, last week’s dream email was long. As my trainer said: lots of detail!
But apparently it was simple. And nothing new, in that I’ve been discussing with her and my neurodoc about how I’m finding my (lack of) emotional support and growing connection to him a strange place to be and am having a hard time accepting this reality. I mean, one is supposed to be attached to one’s therapist in order to do the trauma work. But for daily emotional support, isn’t one supposed to be attached to and intimately connected to one’s family or best friend or spouse, not to your therapist/psychiatrist/neuropsychiatrist? Apparently not necessarily.
Simple, yes, but discomfiting and a hard truth to face fully — not that I haven’t known. It’s just that it’s leading to an entirely new experience for me, one I know I share with others but one, like so many before me, I never envisioned I’d have. It’s like when you have a family, job, friends, volunteering community, you can’t conceive of a day when you’d have none, when you could even be on the streets alone, friendless and family-less.
I’m not on the street, and I have friends. But the deep emotional support that I used to have before my brain injury through my family, my then-husband, and my best friend, now comes in the form of my neurodoc.
My dream said: this is your present-day reality. Accept it.
