Very Strange Dream

I dreamed last night that I was a part of this group of scientists that was doing experiments on rats. We were trying to teach them enlightenment by nearly drowning them over and over again, only to give them a breath or two at the last minute. I have no idea what the theory was, only that there was one.

In the dream, I was torn. My mind said that the theory works, and we will have a bunch of enlightened rats. But my heart said, what we are doing is really cruel. Look at these rats suffering!

When I was in college, I worked for two years in a lab where we routinely killed mice and rats. Not for their benefit, but ours. No enlightened rats. Only theories about the neurotransmitters in human brains.

I woke up feeling a little strange, but less depressed.

I turned on the TV while drinking my morning coffee. Of course it is all about 9/11. Until today, it has been all about the floods.

I remember where I was on 9/11, as I'm sure everyone does. I was living in Philadelphia in grad school. Someone called me up to ask me if we were going to have class that day, and I asked, why wouldn't we have class? And then they told me. I ran to the TV. It was like looking at scenes from a horror movie, I couldn't believe it was real. My dad was in NYC that day, very close by. After the first plane hit, they kept going with their meeting. After the second hit, they stopped. It took him all day long to get home to Brooklyn.

I had a NYC psychiatrist at the time. And he didn't think I was sufficiently traumatized from 9/11- but then he could never read me. He told me it was because of some medication I was taking that had been shown to protect from PTSD in some study. I can't remember which one now.

I was traumatized, but I think not like New Yorkers. And I think that was why he wasn't seeing what he expected- I was living in Philly. Also, I tend to keep my emotions inside a lot. He didn't see what was there.