Is It Live Or Is it Mucinex?

Right around Thanksgiving R brought home a flu like bug. For the next six weeks we proceeded to pass it back and forth. I was beginning to think I was never going to get over it completely. But I finally did.

About a week and a half ago I was in the grocery store and the woman and child behind me were coughing and sneezing and sure enough...being the human petrie dish I am thanks to asthma, I have it again. I have spent about 36 of the last 48 hours in bed asleep.

It comes with a wracking cough so violent that I actually had things start to swim in front of my vision a couple times. Thankfully I never passed out completely. But it's been brutal on my shoulder problem because every time I do cough it bunches those muscles up compounding my problem. Mucinex has been a life saver through this ordeal. I wasn't even aware the stuff existed before the last bout I had with this thing.

The only downside of it is that for some inexplicable reason it causes me to have the most vivid and weird dreams. Even stranger is that many of the dreams have one component in common. I always wake up and then something else happens, but I am not really awake. It's all within the framework of the dream. Then I do wake up and wonder if it was real or not.

Last night I had several of these dreams...I think. The first one I woke up and heard a trickle of water in the bedroom. But then I really woke up and fumbled around in the dark running my foot over the carpet to try to find a wet spot to see where the water was. Of course there wasn't any.

In the second one I woke up and could hear people talking, but I couldn't tell what they were saying. The odd thing was when I woke up for real the cat was growling. So maybe there really were people talking somewhere outside in the dark? She has a habit of growling at people outside.

The third dream was the most alarming, because I don't know for sure if it was a dream or it really happened. I woke up with a sharp searing pain in the left side of my chest. The thing is I only woke up once and I then the pain subsided and I went back to sleep. So I don't know if I really had the pain or not? Nor do I know if I really woke up or if I just dreamt that I woke up? I have been mildly concerned over it all day long. If I did in fact have the pain, was it related to my shoulder? I haven't had any other pains like that ever. If it was real should I be going to the doctor to have something checked?

I finally had one last dream much later in the morning where I heard people talking again, this time downstairs. At first I thought it was the phone. I have a phone downstairs that tells me who is calling, but then I remembered I took the phone off the hook so I could sleep. I am pretty sure that was just a dream. In fact, now that I think about it, people talking seems to be another common thing I dream while taking Mucinex.

While it's great to suppress the cough for the most part, not being able to discern between what's real and what's not is disconcerting.

I hope I am not dreaming this...