Holy crap, have I been dreaming today.

It’s been one of those days, at least so far.

I am a storm-tossed dreamer who can’t find his way home
This shipwrecked existence is all that I’ve known
And if I met a policeman who knew my address
I would follow him blindly and take leave of this mess

Sorry for the sudden poetry, but I just had my exposure to this dude, and wow did it make a huge impression.

His name is Ben Kaplan, and he makes my beard feel inadequate.

That is seriously my kind of music. Emotional, poetic, raw, lyrical, withtouches of madness and sadness and badness and gladness and all the other nesses of the big old messed up world.

So today has been kind of surreal on a couple of levels. I am certainly going to hunt up whatever Ben Kaplan songs I can find. Apparently, dude is so indie that there is not even much of him on YouTube yet, and what there is of him there is all live performances, no studio tracks.

Color me intrigued.

It does not hurt that the guy kind of looks like me. Mostly, that’s just the beard (epic beard!) and glasses, but still. Us bespectacled beardies do not get a lot of media exposure, let alone get to be represented by such a rocking out dude.

But back to the dreams… oh, so many dreams.

I know that at one point, I was having a ball exploring some rich person’s sex dungeon. (Don’t worry, this does not get that erotic or personal. )

I know that before that in the dream, I had an angry confrontation with some shallow rich bitch about what a shallow, vain, and stupid person she was.

But to be fair, I kind of started it by making fun of her dress to some unnamed person who was with me, and I guess she heard.

And it was a fairly ridiculous goth type outfit. What I said to the unnamed person was that there was a fine line between dressing to impress and wearing a costume, and this girls was clearly ready for Halloween, not a night at a club.

Pretty bitchy thing to say, but what the hell, it was a dream and I am coping with a lower Paxil dosage and that seems to be shortening the distance between my thoughts and my mouth.

And that is going to be one tricky bitch to work with, as I have had a long time getting used to being able to think my bitchy little thoughts in private and amusing myself without them escaping my brain through my face and wreaking havoc in the real world.

So I will either have to learn to stop thinking evil little thoughts in order to amuse myself (boring!), or I will have to exert more willpower in order to keep my thoughts to myself.

The latter sounds preferably. I have no idea what I would do with myself if I had to stop letting the occasional nasty thought pass through my mind and amuse me, safe in the knowledge that I would never actually do or say any of the things my little inner demon whispers in my ear.

But anyhow. Sex dungeon. After my run-in with Rich Bitch, someone (I guess the person I made the bitchy comment to? Maybe?) suggested we check out the Dungeon, and I said “Sure!”.

Still, as we made out way there (via a series of increasingly bizarre and athletic steps that involved things like climbing carpeted ladders and jumping down three floors with apparently no damage to us), I felt the need to explain to my guide that I was not into BDSM per se. To me, pleasure and pain are simple, I said. Pleasure is great and pain is bad. But I was sure that there would be something in a well appointed sex dungeon that I would find interesting.

At that point, we parted company. I think she (it was a definite she) was disgusted at my confession of non-kinkiness (if only she knew!) and ditched me. But it didn’t matter because I was there, apparently.

So I wander into a random room, and it is a pretty normal room, set up like a simple hotel room, with a big bed and a bathroom and a sort of living room type area.

Now is when things start getting distinctly weird.

Because in the room is a pleasant seeming lady who is watching a video about this weird device that supposedly removes your shed skin cells from your skin and then uses them to “patch” gaps in your skin, which would supposedly protect you against disease and, I kid you not, mosquitoes.

Now that I am awake, this idea seems impossibly gross. It sounds like it would just result in you smelling terrible and having a lot of zits. But whatever.

After watching the video, I noticed that there was one of these devices in the room with us. So I decided to try it out just on a patch of arm, see what it felt like.

Turns out, it was like getting zapped by static electricity over and over again. Not my cuppa. But I suppose it was someone’s kink.

So I got bored, and decided to see what this place had in its pocketses, or in this case, drawers. I started checking out what was in the drawers of the room I was in.

Nothing too crazy. One drawer had lots of panties in it. Nothing my size though, le sigh. Another had things that looked vaguely like whips or floggers. Boring. Another had a light blue bodice with some other bits of frilly stuff that looked like straps of some sort.

Eventually, I found a computer room, where there was a big screen and porn and stuff, and most of the computer was locked away from tampering fingers. I looked over the porn selections. All boring straight stuff. The only title I remember was ZEBRA, but don’t get excited. It was just interracial.

I don’t remember much more than that. There was more, but dreams melt in daylight.

So, weird shit going on in the cabesa del Fruvous.

Weirder than usual, I mean.

Seeya later folks!

Emotionally speaking, that is.

See, my therapist and I both agreed last Thursday that it was time to take the next step and lower my daily dose of Paxil from 35 mg to 30 mg.

So today is my second day on the lowered dose, and I think I am maybe starting to feel it, because tonight I felt a great and terrible sadness settle into my soul from seemingly nowhere and I am thinking perhaps that is my body and brain missing that extra serotonin boost.

Or not. To be honest, I have no idea what causes my emotional flux. A lot of it could just be from the deep inner processing of emotion and ideas that is constantly going on way back in the background of my psyche.

It would be nice, I suppose, if this deep thought could proceed in some locked off chamber of the mind that only speaks when spoken to, but that is simply not how human beings are wired.

Instead, it is more like my consciousness is always adrift on a deep and mysterious sea which rolls and pitches due to forces far beneath the surface, forces I myself put into place but that I have long since lost the ability to control or predict.

But I cannot entirely discount the chemical changes I will be going through over the next few weeks. I have taken Paxil for over a decade for a reason, and reducing the dosage on it is not something to take lightly. I am wise to be wary of the changes I will go through in the next few weeks. Depression and social anxiety are serious illnesses and not mere phantoms of the mind, easily dismissed.

So why the reduction of dose? Depends on who you ask, in a way. My therapist wants me off Paxil eventually because there are new drugs available now which are superior. Fewer side effects, more effect with smaller dosages, and so forth and so on. And I am down with that. I agree that switching to a better drug sounds like an idea worth pursuing.

But to me, the real reason is that I want better access to my emotions. I think I am ready to reduce the dose and face more of my personal demons. This might be pretty unpleasant some of the time, but judging from the long term effects of my last reduction of dosage, I think it will be worth it.

By letting my inner demons out of their cages, it forces me to deal with them and thus rid myself of them. Paxil and other SSRI’s act as a kind of emotional anesthetic, and when I was deep in the depths of social anxiety and depression, scared of the world and feeling like I was not even real, I needed that kind painkiller in a big big way.

But past a certain point, the swelling is gone, the bones have healed, and it is time for the patient to throw the crutches away and learn to walk on their own again. Those crutches, so necessary during the first part of the patient’s convalescence, become a barrier to it in time, and you cannot learn to be a healthy person unless you put them away.

Luckily, in the case of these chemical crutches of mine, I can throw them away a little at a time. I am reducing my dosage by 1/7th, or around 14.3 percent, and that is not such a big thing in the grand scheme of things, or so it seems.

But I am wary wise of the true nature of brain chemistry altering substances. They do not operate as simple vectors, X amount of drug getting you Y amount of effect.

Biology is rarely that simple, and that goes triple for brain chemistry. Instead, it operates on thresholds. Above a certain threshold, and you get effect Y, period. Below the threshold, you get jack shit, or if you are lucky, maybe a quarter of the previous effect.

I am exaggerating a bit to illustrate the principle, but you get the idea. Each reduction of dosage of a complex drug like an SSRI could have a much larger effect than the mere proportion of dosage would suggest. My mental landscape might change by a lot more than 14.3 percent.

So I will be wary, but on the other hand, I will try not to obsess over it, because that never leads to anything good. An overactive and overpowered brain like mine can easily pick itself apart if not held in check, as I learned in my early twenties when I had severe IBS, hypochondria, depression, anxiety, and a host of other problems.

So the key is to integrate things into your consciousness in a natural and easy way, without either letting the new thing dominate or burying it under a crossroads at midnight.

Just let things unfold in their own time without trying to control the outcome. That is one of the deep and difficult lessons I am learning at this point in my life’s path.

No more micromanaging myself. It clearly is toxic to the desire outcomes, no matter how the false feeling of control lies to you and tells you that only via controlling things can you get good outcomes.

That notion rests on the false assumption that exerting control over something has no cost. But it does have cost, and the more control you exert, the greater than cost, until you are squeezing the very life out of yourself in a vain and misguided attempt at self-control.

True self-control must also include control over the desire for control. It involves leaving things alone which are best left alone, and exerting control only where it is most effective, and then, only as much control as is needed, no more.

As hard as it is for many of us who have a very deep mistrust of the universe, some things truly are better off left alone, and work just great on their own with no interference from management.

And that goes triple for all the little things that go to make up a mind.

Just let go. You will be amazed at how better things will be.

This, I hope to learn. Amen.