Aralen Receptionist Dreams

This is the second day in a row I've woken up rather disturbed by my dreams and I thought I'd write about them seeing how I contribute them to the malaria medication. I can tell now much I will love or hate my job by how much I dream about it and what I'm doing when I dream about it.

Last night I dreamt that I was in my old house in Panama (even since I left Panama when I was 15, I've never stopped dreaming about that mysterious country where I spent 4 years as a teenager) with some of my friends from Australia. The last thing I remember is going from window to window trying to keep this derranged man out of the house. He eventually found his way in and proceeded to eat the flesh off of my friend's bodies in front of me like some sort of ravenous animal, crush their skulls and chuck the fragments at me. Another section of my dream entailed bits where someone would say something, some sort of "magic" word, that would make everyone start to age backwords towards their childhood, except I was turning into a bunny - in a demented, scary, child-like nightmare kind of way. The canibalistic guy disturbed me for the rest of the day until...

Last night I dreamt I was at work, however, since much of my work is repetitive, I was working in a factory where I was answering phone call after phone call on this conveyor belt. Off to the side I see Will staring at me and I'd suddenly in my bed and he's giving the the evil eye for laying down and not working. His evil eye causes the world to start being sucked towards the core of the earth, causing me to feel like the skin is being ripped off my bones. I'm sudedenly in the factory again, only the conveyor belt has turned into a water basin, a pila if I might say (the big water basins used to store water for bathing and washing in El Salvador). There are small twirling objects in the water which resemble the insides of a cassette tape from an answering machine (I deal with many answering machines at work....), except for one of them. Dunkin, Will's dog, seemed to have lost its eyes and was laying at the other end the pila. His eyes were in front of me twirling like a cassette tape string with the ends of his retinas just twirling in the water while I stood there with a tooth pick as if I were rewinding a cassette tape that has come out of its case.

At the end of my dream, I'm in my old house in Mexico and Will and I are in the kitchen. I'm inviting people in for interviews (like I do at my job) and I'm sending them out to go get tested for certain things, but not after having given them vaccinations for something. While I'm waiting for the applicants to come back, I notice strange night creatures starting to crawl in from under the doors and into this cavernous black hole filled with dirt at the back of my kitchen. The creatures crawling into my kitchen weren't just spiders and other creepy things. They were huge black slugs that left a trail of black slimy sludge behind them and creatures that had enough strength to care hands that they had dug up from the earth. I'm assuming these hands they were carrying had come from people's graves.

I've dreamt of crazy stuff before, not as often and not as disturbing as I have been during the last two months I've been on Aralen. I'm not sure whether this is the stress of my new job and feeling like perhaps in the short run, life here seems just as challenging as it did in El Salvador - which makes me feel like I've jumped from the frying pan and into the fire. Or...it could be the ...Aralen.

Either way, I'm deeply disturbed today at how my mind was able to make my job as disgusting and unappealing as possible. I have to do this for the next 5 months. Sheesh.