Game 117: Rangers (Perez) at Yankees (Sabathia)

My brother started to tell me that he had had an experience just a few months before he died. For whatever reason, the conversation was truncated and we never revisited the subject. There seemed to be a hint of religious conversion in what he was saying, but then...he had brain cancer, so it was quite obvious that things were going on in his brain that were not normal. It was painful to see his cancer progress, especially after we had all watched our father go through the same illness almost three decades prior. Still, it would be interesting to know what happens in the human brain and why when tumors begin to press on this or that portion and cells are dying...

I've been fortunate enough to never have had a near death experience, but I can say that I have often had dreams that were so real that I had trouble separating them from reality. Some of the more lucid dreams perhaps have been attributable to ambien, and perhaps to bouts of depression or anxiety. Interesting point here is that who knew that many of the things I was doing in life in the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of security were actually detrimental to those pursuits.

I've had hallucinations before that I attributed to exhaustion. Nothing too spectacular to tell, but a hallucination is a hallucination. I also had one experience that I could never quite figure out if it was a dream or if I was awake. Shortly after my father died, maybe one or two nights later I saw a face almost directly in front of mine while I was in bed in a very dark bed room. I recall waking (I think I was awake) to see the face staring at me. I wasn't sure if it was my father or not. It was expressionless and just staring right at me. My pulse quickened. I became short of breathe. I ever so slowly drew my leg back and hollered out a loud HA! as I kicked at it with all my might. This woke my ex-wife screaming. As it turned out, I had kicked the front of our dresser next to the bed. I was quite fortunate to miss the sharp corner of the edge of the dresser and not injure myself.

There was no sign of anyone in the room and there was never a re-occurrence. Poor Ruthie gets an odd kick or punch in the middle of the night on occasion when one of my dreams goes haywire. I recently read that acting out dreams CAN be a sign of early onset dementia. Or it can just be a bad dream that means nothing...