I don’t usually remember my dreams, but the one from last night hasn’t completely faded yet. Something happened in the world and people were given something that granted them the ability to regenerate. Death and sickness should have been a thing of the past, but I became sick anyway. I struggled to breathe and move around while people all around me looked on with concern. Towards the end, some decision was made. Surgery? Burial? My family was going to move on without me? I don’t remember the exact detail. I just remember hating it. The anger rekindled my will, and I forced myself up. I went to a sick and made myself cough up all of the things filling my lungs. The large particulate matter refused to disgorge. I stuck my fingers deep down my throat and grabbed strings and mud and bits that aren’t supposed to be in the body and pulled it all out. The last foreign object I removed was a near perfect gray and white feather. As I looked at it in the sink, I breathed easy.

Then I began stomping around the room, forcing strength back into my limbs while my family watched with concern. I shouldn’t have been able to do that, one of them said. “The regeneration didn’t take, so how is he regenerating?” someone else said. I heard their doubts, and that just made me grit my teeth and stomp harder. In the end, I emerged from the house and started stomping around the world, which did not seem ready for me.

As I was writing this recount of the dream, I wondered if this had anything to do with the pandemic. When I first woke up, I thought this was more about what I’ve been talking about lately, which is the depression and anger with myself. Maybe the dream is about fear of getting sick, but I think it’s more about knowing that I’m already unwell in my head. Everyone else in the world has something given to them that helps them, but it doesn’t help me. I have the ability to get better on my own, but I have to choose to do so. If I don’t make that choice, the world will move on without me.

As I slept, the first piece of my new custom keyboard finished printing. Each of the main pieces will take 6 hours. The second piece will be finished around 3PM. We visited Home Depot last night just before they closed, to make sure there were fewer people there, and I picked up a new soldering iron and a heat gun, the tools I need for the keyboard and for the liquid cooling in my gaming PC. Progress is happening with both of those projects.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about writing and the critique group from yesterday.