Me on Meds... Scary (8-1)

Would just like to go on record and say that I officially hate taking the anti-malarial Malarone. That toxic combination of proguanil and some other med starting with “a” that I don’t remember and can’t pronounce… is making me go batty! I guess that I should have known what effects it would have when there was a big warning label on it that said “don’t drive until you are familiar with the effects of this med”. I did however fail to realize that one of the side effects was hallucinatory dreams! Yes, that is right, dreams. Actually while I was still in America before setting sail for remote reaches of Africa (or what I thought was remote), I was already experiencing the lovely effects of this drug. Now, to fully understand these effects you must also understand that I am one of those people that has dreams and knows that they are dreaming. There is a fancy psychological term for it, something like conscious dreaming. That is the way that pretty much all of my dreams are. And yes, I use it to my advantage, because if I know that it is just a dream, I know that I can get away with anything, and I can change the dream if I don’t like the way that it’s going… after all, it is all in MY head. So I have not had trouble with those awful nightmares for many years now, because I just change them if I don’t like them. Enter Malarone… now, not only do I not realize that I am dreaming, but I find the most disturbing combination of everything that has happened to me that day or the past week and combine it into the LONGEST nightmare ever! Case and point: a dream while still in Africa about coming home 2 weeks early. All the facts were right, my Grandma picked me up at the airport, I knew the exact date and the date that I should have flown in, even some of the weird sequences at the airport were exactly like real life. The main problem being that I (in my dream) didn’t want to come home 2 weeks early, and I had arrived at the airport but couldn’t remember any of the almost 20hr flight that I would have had to have been on to get to the airport! I actually woke up fussing from that one, cause I was so frustrated. So much of it made sense, but too much of it was just hanging… Anyway, fast forward to last night when I literally had a dream that I was in Mulago hospital (Uganda) and being chased/attacked by zombie children patients! Yeah, don’t even ask! I would have to say that this is probably one of the most disturbing dreams that I have had in a long time. Of course I did realize that it was a dream, because seriously… zombies?!? But it still was little fun especially when I am trying to explain to the doctor at the hospital that all these kids are infected and she is like, “no, they are just scared, that’s why they are acting this way”. Anyway, I don’t know who would want to actually read my dream, so I’ll stop and just say that I kind of wonder if this is how they come up with some of the movies that they make… seriously just pop a couple Malarone, sit back and take a nap, then wake up and write a script! Sounds a little too easy and you get the added advantage of being immune to malaria while writing your script! Bonus points!