09 April 2011

The Time I Started Going Blind and Almost Ran Over Some Pirates and Also There Was a Dragon

Last night I dreamt that my left eye, which has been all achy and red for a few months, got even redder and achier, so I drove to the Student Health Center. It looked more like a one-star motel with brown industrial carpet and a TV and double bed in each exam room, but it was the Student Health Center.
My doctor was a beautiful Ethiopian woman who smelled faintly spicy. She shone a light in my eye but didn't tell me much. She said I should come back if it got worse, and I drove home. On the way home, I saw some pirate day-laborers waiting at a bus stop by Morrill Middle School (San José, California).
Then something happened with my friends, who were something between Hogwarts students and young Camelot residents from the series Merlin. We had a dragon, who was sometimes like the dragons in the Harry Potter series and sometimes like the dragon in Merlin and sometimes like Dragon from the Shrek series. I don't remember much about that subplot.

Anyway, a few days later, I woke up in my Hogwarts/Camelot dorm room, and I could barely see. I had some sort of tunnel vision, except the tunnel was white instead of black. If I blinked and then concentrated really hard, I could see clearly for a second or so. I stumbled over some clutter to the mirror, got so close that my nose was against the glass, and did the blink-squint thing. My left iris had this thick white filmy ring around it that nearly covered the pupil, and my right iris was starting to get a white ring too, but it was only around the outside part of the iris. Needless to say, I felt a little panicky.
I went to my friends to ask them if I could have a ride on the dragon to the Student Health Center, but they were busy saving a kingdom or something. So, I had to drive myself, going blink-squint-blink-squint to gather intermittent information about the road and the cars around me. I prayed. A lot.
Somehow I made it to the Health Center, and I was called into the exam room by the same Ethiopian doctor. She ushered me in and asked me to sit on the edge of the bed like last time, but now there was a suspicious-looking wet spot on the worn brown cotton bedspread. The spot smelled like urine. I tried not to sit on it, which was hard because I couldn't see very well. The doctor examined me and told me I was going blind because I hadn't come in early enough for the original redness-soreness thing that is actually happening during my waking hours.
I got in the car and started driving back, blink-squint-blink-squint. I got closer to where I'd seen the pirate day-laborers before, but then I didn't blink long enough and I missed a cycle and when my vision finally cleared again, the pirates had moved onto the road and I was going to hit them. Of course, then my vision whited out again so I had to blink. When I squinted again, the pirates were all holding their arms up and shouting at me, "Are you blind?!" but they had moved out of the way of the car. I drove home as quickly as possible and curled up in my bed. That evening I had to tell my friends on the dragon squad that I was going blind and that my eyes looked all milky and gross, but I never heard their reactions because then I woke up.

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