They send the heart police to put you under cardiac arrest

[austin_dern]

[ Sorry I'm late. I, er, forgot what time it was. ]

I want to interrupt recounting Morphicon to relate a dream, something kind of nightmare-like although not frightening, which I think is notable at least because it's had me shaken even after a day and night passed. If you find nightmares contagious you may just want to skip right down to the trivia item of the day.

In the dream, I heard a sharp, industrial-type buzzing siren, the kind of short pulse you might hear from the alarms in an old Navy movie. This ``woke'' me as I sat upright and realized something was very wrong, which was that my heart wasn't beating. It made sense to me to think the buzzing was a warning that my heart had stopped, and that left me with the problem of what to do about it.

I tried hitting my chest some, not too hard, lest I wake bunny_hugger with the noise. I didn't want to alarm her unnecessarily. I couldn't be sure whether my heart was beating again, so I got out of bed and walked around some, and then faster some, in the hopes that if my heart were racing I'd know with confidence it was working. I couldn't be sure, feeling my chest, that it actually was beating, and while I thought I heard a beat, I couldn't convince myself that I wasn't fooling myself out of the need to hear it.

So I was left wondering, if my heart had stopped, then how long did I have? Sure, I couldn't carry on indefinitely like that, but a minute? A couple minutes? That's plausible that I could do something, right? Should I wake bunny_hugger? But what could she do about it? She'd be traumatized if I got her up just to watch me die, but then, it wouldn't be a lot better if she woke up to find I'd died overnight, would it?

I'm not precisely sure how the dream ended, although I think I came to the rationalization that it had been so long since my heart had stopped, and that I hadn't suffered any ill effects, that maybe I just didn't need a heartbeat after all, and I went back to sleep within the dream. At least I'm pretty sure it was within the dream. In any case, it's been over a day now and I don't seem to be impaired any.

Trivia: In the first winter of 1927, their inaugural season, the Harlem Globetrotters won 101 of their 117 games. Source: 1927: High Tide of the 1920s, Gerald Leinwand.

Currently Reading: A Calculating People: The Spread Of Numeracy in Early America, Patricia Cline Cohen.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

If it upset you for a day or more, how can you say it wasn't frightening?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, the dream itself wasn't frightening. I was more concerned about what to do regarding the problem. But it also stuck in my head and the horror of it --- the idea that your life has ended, but you have a couple minutes to be helplessly aware of it --- grabbed me.