I take a drug called Paxil for obsession. I missed one day and had the most obsessive dreams I could imagine. I woke up just now at 6 minutes to 6 am from an obsessive nightmare.

My things were gone. All the useless things. The things I’d been collecting.

I had bought a beautiful wooden chest that had a variety of drawer sizes from small to large, tall and thin. In each drawer, a collection of things, mostly useless. Random things. I remember most vividly, the fake money from tabletop board games. Every conceivable denomination from Monopoly to Masterpiece. I spent much of the dream sorting stacks of mixed currencies into their appropriate size and colour stacks.

Sorting newspaper clippings from old advertising and celebrity autographs on all sorts of assorted papers.

I had taken over the whole living room floor with little piles of paper and clumps of various clutter. When anyone would ask why, I’d answer; why not, as if that were a perfectly acceptable response to the situation. Every now and then, I’d sneak in the question; do you think that’d be worth anything on eBay, knowing full well I had no intention of selling. I suppose it was a mild comfort that my stack of 237 Masterpiece green 1 million dollar bills might actually have a real world value anywhere but inside my mind.

The cabinet itself was beautiful. I opened each drawer with joy as I showed off the treasures in each to the spectators that had gathered around my mess. I’d open one and it would contain some oddity I’d be impressed with. Usually, they just didn’t get me. They failed to share my joy. The dream started to fail me from there.

Self-doubt – the second voice that ruins everything brings with it the feelings of guilt. I see the situation with perspective and suddenly the carpeted floor has been turned over like a farmer’s field after harvesting the season’s corn, refreshed in the spring to be reborn as a new crop. The floor had been rototilled into mud,  and all my stuff was mixed among the freshly tilled dirt like an archeologist dig, lost under a fresh level of topsoil. 

When I spotted items from my real life memories including some Lego pieces I owned, I realized they’d destroyed stuff from all my cabinets too, not just the obsessive collection, I started to really freak out and cry.

Then I awoke, adjusted back to reality, found it mildly amusing and started to write this down.

I know I forgot a lot, including the moment a horse walked into the house and was going to need up the piles, but that seemed so non sequitur, I didn’t understand how it fits in, in either reality.

I think I better renew my prescription today.

If I go another day without, I may experience something oddly similar happening in my real life. I already have a few oddly random collections of things.

6:28am.

“It’s not real money. It’s Monopoly money” is an obscure quote I frequently use from the odd movie; What’s up Tiger Lily”. To date, nobody has ever recognized the line.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061177/