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Just woke from a dream in which I was dead ... and trying to figure out how to keep my computers running as long as possible after I died. Woke up while trying to figure out how long the automatic payments for the Internet connection would keep working, and whether whoever else took over from me would get to keep the same static IP address.
I'd only been asleep for sixty to ninety minutes, and the waking-up felt very sudden, a lot more like being jolted awake by the sound of a car crash or having one's tent collapse ... or getting a sudden, painful cramp. Hmm. I've got a cramp in a muscle below my left shoulderblade; I wonder whether I jerked suddenly as I woke up and caused that, or that was what jerked me out of the dream in the first place. (It was the "have to stop and think about the details" kind of point in the dream which tends to be a way that dreams wake me up, so it seems likely that the dream was what did it.)
It's a disorienting feeling, lurching from dreamland to the waking world like a driver trying to operate a clutch for the first time. It's a physical feeling of disorientation -- I feel it in my stomach and my gut -- which makes it tempting to perceive it as a feeling of physical disorientation, as though my body had been in a different place, not just a different state ... as though my body had been "in dreamland", not just my mind, however much I rationally know that wherever I go in a dream my body stays in the bed. (But if I type the word 'phenomenology' when I'm this tired, the "Mu-Nu-Mu-Nuh" song will perversely get stuck in my brain, with Muppets singing "Phe-no-me-na" instead of "Muh-nuh-mu-nuh", so I'd better avoid mentioning that particular branch of psychology / philosophy. Whoops, too late. (Yow -- I wasn't expecting visuals to go with the earworm, but there they are. (Wait, am I awake? If this entry exists in the morning, then I guess I will have been awake and actually typing it now. Besides, I don't usually hear the keyboard clacking when I dream I'm typing.)))
Where was I?
Oh yeah -- when science fiction authors depict teleporting or entering/leaving hyperspace as being physically uncomfortable, this is what I imagine it must feel like. (When they describe it as not-uncomfortable or don't specify what it feels like, I imagine it differently.) It's a feeling of WrongPlace, a feeling of suddenly HavingBeenMoved (as opposed to having moved). It's also a feeling of having been moved slightly wrong somehow, so my internal organs aren't quite in their proper places and need a few minutes to realign themselves. There's stomach discomfort, but it's not exactly nausea; it's not the feeling of needing to throw up, but closer to the feeling of already having vomited, minus that really awful taste and irritated throat. (It's not quite that feeling, but closer to that than anything else I can think of right at this moment.)
I don't remember how the dream about being dead and worrying about how long things would continue working started. The last thing I remember before that was a dream of being at an event a little like Pennsic, a little like RenFest, a little like a week-long version of Starwood, at which I found that one of the vendors had, in addition to some cute leather clothing (I bought a sexy top that would be completely the wrong style for my body in real life but was really hot on me in the dream), DVDs of recent television shows that I'd missed because of not setting the VCR in my tent correctly (it needed to be set each day for some reason; I couldn't program day ahead of time -- and there was no sign of electricity in my dream other than my having a VCR and a DVD player in my tent and managing to keep my PDA charged). I don't remember how/whether that dream ended, except that at some point I was showing the merchant how my PDA worked and she seemed impressed by how useful such a device would be to her despite my having a lot of things go wrong (including the buttons being in the wrong place and forgetting which did what).
It's taken long enough to write this that my stomach feels normal again, though my back still hurts rather a lot. I wonder whether I can get back to sleep now. An hour of sleep just isn't enough.