It was a very dark night, not a cloud in the sky, yet there were no stars and no moon.  I remember it like it was last night, but it was actually the night of March 26th, just a few weeks ago.  I remember every detail.

We were hurriedly walking, almost running, across and in front of the open space on our left between two houses separated by an empty lot.  We were on the edge of the dark street.

The house on the right, the one we were heading toward, was on the edge of a hill.  The house on the left was almost a mirror image of the one on the right, each over two stories tall and each of almost identical construction.  In the darkness I had a sense that each was a pale grey.  The vacant lot between them was totally empty and bare.

As we hurried past the empty space toward the house at the edge of the hill, the house on the right, I looked up above the empty space of the vacant lot and there, suspended in the air, was a large train set, the kind a child would have from Christmas, but larger.  The train was going round and round, counter clockwise, but the only track visible was that which was under the train.  As the train continued forward in its circle so did the blue neonish glow of the track beneath it.  As the train passed, the track behind it faded to nothing.

There was an unseen something to fear as we hurried, but I didn’t know what it was.  It was just my instinct, I suppose.

Finally we moved past the open space, went up the tall steps to the house, and across the shallow porch toward the front door.  As we went up the steps I was practically dragging the young one with me.  He couldn’t have been much more than 7 or so and there was no face, just a body with short legs that couldn’t keep up with me, but he had to.  There was danger out there so I had to get us inside.

As we entered the house and into the yellowish light of a foyer, still feeling the fear of whatever was out there following us, I felt a tremendously strong hand in the middle of my back.

The hand gripped the center of my back and twisted.  I thought the twisting would tear my back apart and I yelled.

And then I woke up.

My back felt like it was being twisted by that great threateningly strong hand and as I awakened I knew I had to grab a pain pill and a muscle relaxer quickly.  It had been a dream, a nightmare really, but with a very real and physical link.

That was my fourth night home from the hospital following surgery and it was the second dream that had awakened me.  Oddly, I have no recollection of a single detail of the first dream, which had occurred two nights before, though for that one my wife just happened to have been standing beside the bed when I awoke and I grabbed her as a drowning swimmer grabs his rescuer.

Yes, chemicals, even the best and most carefully prescribed ones, can do strange things to one’s mind.  In addition to two “procedures” which required hospitalization in 2003 and 2004, this has been my 5th surgery in three years to the month and each involved pain killers afterward.  Four of the five have also involved muscle relaxers.

I’ve fortunately learned how those drugs affect me and try to use them intelligently.  I also know that after each of my surgeries I have had dreams, probably better described as nightmares, and always within the first week or ten days of coming home.  Knowing these things makes it easier to accept them, but such knowledge has nothing to do with the reaction to them in the instant.  Using knowledge requires a degree of consciousness that does not exist when having a nightmare.  What happens, happens.

But I find this particular one intriguing. 

I do not believe in the interpretation of dreams and do not accept that we can find a “meaning” behind dreams.  However, there are indeed some interesting aspects of this one, beginning with the simple fact that I remember it in such vivid detail, and that I still do now, a few weeks later.

The ending is obvious.  I was having a muscle spasm, common and expected after lumbar surgery.  The spine has been elongated a bit, while conversely the muscle and connective tissue have been shortened a bit, so the body, must now accept that things are different.  The muscles now have to be longer in a fairly real sense. 

This gives a sensation that I describe as a permanent Charley Horse, permanent at least until the muscles decide to play ball and deal with their new requirements.  This is not a Charley Horse that goes away with massage of weird appendage movements.  Nothing makes it go away, including the muscle relaxers.  Meantime, the muscles will express their objections in the form of spasms, and some are get-your-attention-in-no-uncertain-terms spasms, even if you are asleep. 

But what about everything else?

Well, we lived Massachusetts until 1999, not really so long ago, in a house very much as described.  It was clapboarded in dull gray, 2+ stories, on a hill, with a vacant lot to the left.  That could be easily seen as “the house on the right.”  The steps up to the porch were definitely steep and the porch was shallow.  We installed siding ourselves, my sons and I, which turned it white, but that weather-worn clapboard gray was the color until we covered it up. 

The “house on the left” doesn’t fit at all.  It was a corner house at the bottom of the hill and was nowhere nearly as tall as ours.  And I don’t remember it being gray, though it may have been.

That youngster I was hustling along with me?  I don’t know.  We have three sons, two of whom lived in that house, all three of whom worked on the siding project.  (And you don’t want to tackle siding a three story place on a hill, trust me.  We learned the hard way, my fault, but once you begin…)  The size and age of the youngster don’t fit, however.

The train in midair?  I have no idea, though I had trains when I was a kid, my father worked for the Southern Pacific railroad most of his life, as did his father, and I love trains.

Moral of the story?  None that I know of.

Mystery?  No, I think just another indication of how the mental processes and the body are so intrinsically related.  The back muscles are out there getting ready to throw a party and the mind decides to put on its very own show.  It’s as if the brain had to do the lampshade dance on the coffee table as the party began.

Would prefer the back muscles not invite the brain — just have the damned party and let the lampshade showoff remain elsewhere.