21:32. Maybe I can write myself down?
Had a nightmare last night that woke me up. I always live through (sleep through) the worst parts, then wake when there would be a cut to a new scene if it were being filmed. I’m not usually scared in the moment of the experiences, but can struggle to calm down upon waking. Replaying the images and scenes when I’m awake, sitting up in the darkened room alone: then I get scaredy. Usually my heart rate is already elevated, and I take steps to bring it down. Sometimes getting out of bed helps to clear my head of the ambience of the dream, even though the characters and images themselves rarely fade until days after. J finds it fascinating that my dreams are so vivid. I tell him how I used to have to sleep on the floor by my mom’s bedside as a child, for fear. I haven’t had one that scary in a while. Chalk it up to bingeing “Wednesday” on Netflix last night before bed.
It rained all day and just let up in the last hour. I drove J to work after the sauna and before he went in we went up into the northwest part of campus, cut the engine, and sat listening to the patter. Rain is still my favorite weather. I wonder if not all desert people are like that.
When it’s cold like this, using the sauna changes. First, more girls are using it, though luckily most of them only last a few minutes. More importantly, it hurts. When the skin stays cold for hours or days at a time, heated only artificially from external sources (like my electric blanket or the radiator), then the first few minutes in the sauna feel blissfully relieving; but soon, the chilled skin starts to really register the heat, and the barrier that has not been broken for hours or days tautens as it tries to manage this influx of temperature… the body’s reluctance to sweat burns sharply like friction, like ice.
It is sometimes ten minutes or more before the body gives in and breaks a sweat. I can’t describe that now because I’m cold. Anyway, it is mere moments upon exiting the sauna that she loses all that heat and gets back to a reptilian, papery cool. Even taking a hot shower afterwards does little to prolong the sensation gained in session; toweling dry and dressing take more than a minute, and the work feels lost by then.
The muscular, vascular, mental, and emotional effects seem to wear off much faster in the winter, but it is likely just a higher contrast between the discomfort of the cold and the sporadic, medicinal application of high heat. I’m also cranky right now because even blasting the radiator at above 70F can’t shake the chill of a person descending into ‘winter’ of the cycle. J noticed my blue lips for the first time last week. God bless him. When I was a child, they were almost always blue. Birds of a feather…
image: blue sky betrays blistering cold (Bryce Canyon, Utah, 2021)