Slip Sliding Away
The Special Collections coordinator had just welcomed my son Devon and me into the Pequot Library’s archives to see their First Folio and some other old Shakespeareana, so it made perfect sense that, afterwards, I would want to tell my professor Martin about it.
“The title page and the Droeshout portrait were reproductions, pasted in. Still, they had a few other later Folios, too.” My Shakespeare Institute dissertation advisor slowly nodded his shock of untamed white hair, pensive.
“That’s odd,” I thought, especially since I still stood in the Southport parking lot, Devon having just driven off, while Martin was in Oxford, England, as far as I knew. “Hmm, the imagination is strong with this one - that’s what Shakespeare will do to a girl,” I concluded, and drove off to my next errand.
I stood in Stanton Miles talking to the longtime owner of the local vacuum cleaner repair and window treatment shop, sharing ideas for my living room shade with him. Images strobed in my mind - hard to catch, like the names of the local stations that the number 4 express subway train whizzes through, so I had to concentrate hard to stay with him. Like in that surreal space between sleep and wakefulness, when you struggle to hold on to and make sense of fleeting dream snippets. I hoped I was nodding my head at appropriate intervals.
Leaving, I struggled to remember why my living room window treatments mattered at all given the slideshow of dream fragments that seemed more urgent and real. A tingly chill cursed through me, even in the 90 degree heat, and I started to freak out. Just a little.
Gripping the steering wheel very tightly and driving at a short-old-man-in-a-Cadillac crawl, I drove to my ex-husband’s house. It was close and I knew he and his wife would be at home, from whence they work.
“Do you ever have this thing where like you sort of remember pieces of dreams you had the night before but like they’re very vivid and sort of like actually happening?” I sat on his office basement couch, slightly curled in on myself. He looked up and put his phone down and made strong, concerned eye contact with me. I sensed he was trying to perform some Star Trek Dr. Bones health scan on me as he said:
“Yes, sometimes, I guess. Did you sleep ok?”
“Yeah, it was just weird. I’m ok. I’m ok. Thanks.” And I left, not wanting to bother him further mid-workday. I headed to the town library, sure that a good writing session would distract me or un-distract me, as it were. At a coveted window seat, I put pen to paper and concentrated hard, hoping the glitchy feeling would dissipate. But then I kept seeing intricate test patterns from the 1960s, when television went off the air after the late-late-late movie. It made sense because it fit so well on the graph paper on which I wrote. But then I felt a tug at the back of my T-shirt, as if someone were trying to save me from slipping off a cliff, and realized the pattern could not actually be there. “Odd, I must be spacing out. Focus. Focus, Diane,” I thought, calmly for someone who seemed to be losing a grip on reality. Even though the thin chain around my neck that usually felt like a thin chain around my neck now felt like a thin, cool stream of water,- “At least it’s cool,” I thought, after the relentless heat had scorched me all month.
More TikTok dream snippets scrolled through my mind: bees swarmed me but I explained to someone off-camera that they oughtn’t worry; we need to protect endangered bees and they meant no harm. I ushered a group of tweens out of a minivan (I never owned a minivan) to a Little League baseball field, ostensibly for practice, noting that I had to pee and wondering where I might do so. I scrutinized a train schedule to figure out when the next one left. Apparently it already had.
Dreams fascinate me. In some attempt to download, process, and categorize all that we experience (and that we don’t), our minds concoct scenarios more elaborate than any fiction I might write if I could write fiction. Normally, I remember and try to write them down to see if I can make sense of them. Normally, unless they’re nightmares, they intrigue more than scare me.
But having them in the middle of the day in the middle of the library felt decidedly not amusing. I struggled to snap out of this waking reverie, feeling like an odd compilation of literary characters: Alice, Peter Pan, Dorothy, Charlie Bucket… but I did not want to go down a rabbit hole, visit Neverland or Oz, or take the tour at Willy Wonka’s factory. I wanted to be home and sane, and hoped I could get to both safely.
Surrender
I drove home shakily as anxiety and fear tried to wrestle the wheel from me. In retrospect I realize I should no more have driven in that state of mind than if I’d tossed back three tequila shots, but I saw no alternative at the time. Once home, I grabbed a Kind Bar, thinking I should eat something before my poor boys had to commit their mother to a facility because she was losing hers. I sent Donald this text, verbatim:
I’m having thoughts that don’t make sense. I’m scared. I’m coming back because I’m afraid to be alone.
I sat curled up in one of their just-darker-than-sky-blue velvet bucket chairs, afraid to move lest I slip off the edge. Samira (Donald’s wife) sat with me and asked a series of sensible questions. She later told me that my responses (as clear as the Coors Rocky Mountain streams to me) made no sense. She dialed my therapist, whom I’d not seen in a while, and left a message. She went back to work and I watched Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson spar in Much Ado About Nothing, hoping that’s how I would eventually title this odd episode. Nothing Shakespeare can’t cure.
Donald came up shortly thereafter and asked some more questions. “I’m going to call Sarfraz,” he said, referring to our family’s GP of 20+ years. “OK,” I said, but thought, “Silver Hill, here I come.” At least I’d be safe and maybe they could fix me. I tried to stay inside my skin. The dream sequences had abated.
Devon came home, surprised to see me there. I was so happy to see him, but so worried that he’d worry. “Come, tell me what happened,” he took my hand and led me outside to the patio. He held my hands and looked at my eyes as I recounted the morning’s adventures. I made an effort to speak slowly and clearly so as not to scare him.
“You sound OK,” he said as he hugged me. “Have you eaten anything? Been drinking water?” Not so much. It was 3:00 p.m. by then - where had the day gone? I’d had half a leftover shake before I worked out at the gym and had barely touched the trenta black iced tea no water extra ice four Splenda that I got en route to the Pequot. He brought a cup of trail mix and a banana from the kitchen along with my iced tea. This sweet, sweet boy.
Donald called me back in because Sarfraz was on the line. I love my doctor who, as he often tells me, knows me better than I do. I don’t call often. He knows that when I do, it’s serious. I told him the whole story and he asked a series of questions of the neurological ilk, trying, I supposed, to rule out stroke.
“I think you were hypoglycemic. It can happen. I want you to take a Xanax now, and one before bed and come see me Friday,” - he made the appointment himself as we spoke. He knew very well that I’d resist, not being fond of pharmaceuticals, but also he knew the wave of anxiety this experience would unleash. “Just take them, Diane,” he said.
By the time I had eaten (I stayed for pizza) and been drugged (Donald and Samira had driven me to pick up the Xanax) I felt ok. No more slipping into alternative universes for the balance of the afternoon and evening, so I felt competent and safe enough to go home and watch the Mets.
I called Dustin en route - Devon had kept him informed with a “mom had a break from reality” text - to let him know that I was indeed okay. Or better, anyway.
Sarfraz was SO right. It was not a wave, but a tsunami. I flinched at every stimulus, felt a dull migraine hover over my right ear, and ate on a military schedule to keep my blood sugar steady. And admonished myself. I have a PhD in Holistic Nutrition and regularly lecture anyone who will listen about food. I should have known better. I had an anxiety hangover, or, as my sister says, was experiencing aftershocks. The ground below my mental state felt shaky, and catastrophic thinking kicked in. Was that a real breeze or is it happening again should I cancel lunch next week will I be able to go to England next month what if this happens there why do I need so many shoes?
Science
“Squeeze my hands, push them away, stand on one foot. The other. With your eyes closed. Follow this pencil with your eyes.” Sarfraz concluded that I’d suffered neither a stroke nor a brain tumor - nor a psychotic break. He told me how woozy and spacey he sometimes feels during the first few days of Ramadan.
“How do you do it? Feel like that and function?” I asked.
“My body is accustomed to it,” he said. “You were hypoglycemic. When our blood sugar dips, the liver can draw glucose and deliver it to most organs in the body. Except the brain. Especially when you described what you experienced as deja vu, or like dreams you’d had - it made perfect sense. You need to eat.” He pricked my finger and said that even now, at 12:30, my glucose was low.
“I know, I know. I was going to eat lunch after this.” He nodded.
“I know, I know,” he mimicked me good naturedly. “Eat.” And he insisted that I schedule a physical since I’d not had one since before COVID-19.
The aftershocks have become fewer and farther apart, and I’m hoping they disappear altogether. The hangover is fading. And as I write, I’m eating.
Reflection
Oddly, as I reflect from the calm waters of relative sanity, I feel shaken, not stirred. Meaning that while the episode, as I now euphemistically refer to it, turned me upside down and shook me up mentally as much as the Incredible Hulk Coaster would have physically, it didn’t take the emotional toll I had anticipated. The unfamiliarity and uncertainty upset me the most. And that makes perfect sense to me: the worst things about anxiety are feeling out of control and not knowing when it will stop. But I felt remarkably peaceful and circumspect about the possibility that something quite serious might be afoot. I just wanted to know what it was. I feared burdening my children with an ailing or dying mother more than I feared the actual ailing or dying. None of us is getting out of here alive (according to Nanea Hoffman, anyway), and that’s ok. I don’t want to live forever. I just prefer to live in a dimension with which I’m familiar for as long as I’m here.