a wolf and January are looking for something

Chemo tinkers chemically with the brain in ways that interfere with sleep, and lorazepam is prescribed routinely. You are instructed to take it throughout treatment, as sleep deprivation has an obvious dampening effect on healing. Friends who have had chemo emphasize to me the importance of protecting my sleep, and urge me to surrender to needing chemical intervention. It's not about anxiety; it's that chemo has pulled the plug on the sleep mechanism.

I understand that as a concept, but always have to find out for myself. A few nights ago, I tried taking melatonin only, and lay awake until 4:45 in the morning. Good experiment, bad night. I think I understand how curiosity killed that damned cat. She gathered lots of fascinating data in her life, but she had big bags under her eyes since she was a kitten. 

The lorazepam helps me sleep, but it feels like an unnatural sleep -- like Juliet's, maybe. Remember that she wakes up and stabs herself. She can't have gotten very good sleep to have made that judgment call. With lorazepam, I wake up feeling hungover (I think. See post re never-been-drunk for caveat). It pulls a different plug -- the one on the dreaming state, in which the brain does some important repair work.

Living outside the law of Dr. D, I took my naturopathic sleep supplements last night, instead of the lorazepam.

Consider the following dream fragments from one night's natural sleep:

My beloved sister Ellen wants to bring fresh garden tomatoes to my oncologist. They are perfect, sun warm, deep red, delicious.

In my coat sleeve, I am hiding a bamboo hairpin from the young police officer that gives me directions.

We are all given metal playground slides to assemble. I am really embarrassed that mine comes out so steep and rickety.

There is no longer a direct road around town. You have to pull yourself on a sled.

I pass a rundown building with the following words engraved in its stone facing: "Home for Those Who Need a Time Out."

This final fragment happened not last night, but right after surgery, and it has stayed with me, as it captures the poetry and mysterious necessity of dreaming. As the dream happened, it made perfect sense, but it comes into the light of day sounding both impossible and somehow true: a wolf and January are looking for something.