Sleep

Those who know me are well aware that I place great importance in sleep & dreams, despite my struggles with insomnia.

The more I write down my dreams, the more I recall the next ones, and thus the closer I get to lucid dreaming again. Whenever I break that streak, an infusion of mugwort will usually get me back on track. If not, then I introduce more plants: skullcaps, blue lotus, valerian, lemonbalm, chamomile, shatavari... with plants, I find that trying them individually at first is best, and then as you combine them, you build your own key, with each plant pushing a pin until you unlock the realm of vivid dreams.

My dream journal is never just a place to write down my dreams: a few lines about how I felt when I opened my eyes, symbols that seemed familiar, people and my relation to them, weather and what it meant to me... details that often reveal patterns that were invisible while experiencing them, while in the moment. Over time, certain images recur with great insistance: angels, getting blinded, tattoos, birds. I suppose that in Jungian terms, dreams aren't just your brain high on cleaner fluid, they put masks over things that would otherwise horrify your ego so that you may face them with understanding.

When I’m trying to understand a dream, I ask simple questions first: what in me is this scene representing? What emotion is weighing on me during the day? Some nights are clear: they carry the rage that burns my chest at the thought of those who've wronged me, confidence that wants expression but is stifled by a speech impediment, love that isn't allowed to exist out of fear of being used. Other nights are much subtler. The point isn’t to force an interpretation, over time as I write, things connect and make sense.

I am glad to have gotten into both dream recall and herbalism! Having infusions at night has been great with sleep, it's like a switch labelled "time to stop going through what happened during the day, now we move onto another world" at my nervous system. I keep the doses modest, and if I want it strong, I switch to tinctures.

Lucidity, for me, isn’t about taking control of the dream, not ata all, it’s about being aware, really aware, like I'm in the dream as much as I'm here.

(Herbs can interact with medications and health conditions; do check before trying any of the ones I listed!)

Altar to health

When I moved to Milan, I bought a little robot vacuum to combat the dust that had started to make me feel icky and sick. I named it Hygieidora, or "Gift of Hygieia". It served me and still serves me well (travelling with it was actually quite easy, I shoved it in my laptop bag and the airport staff didn't bat an eye).

Random tidbits: Hygieia figures in the Hippocratic oath. The Greek historian Pausanias wrote that a statue of her was covered in hair and pieces of Babylonian clothes. The word for health, Hugieia was used as a greeting amongst the Pythagoreans. The most recent find related to her (this time a statue) was in 2021.

Hygieia had four sisters: Panacea (universal remedy), Iaso (recuperation), Aceso (the healing process), and Aegle (radiant good health). Together they attended their father Asclepius, and their grandfather was Apollo himself. There's something lovely about health being a family affair. Her symbol is a snake drinking from a bowl or chalice (you've definitely seen it on the emblem of pharmacies). In sculptures, she's often shown feeding the serpent, a gentle hand tending to something powerful.

She's an important goddess, despite not having the Olympian statue (discounting Athena Hygieia). Hygieia has always felt like an underrated kind of divine presence. She's the "being well enough to live your life". She's the gratefulness you feel when you're finally better. She wasn't exactly a goddess of healing, rather she was the goddess of "not being sick".

In Milan, I went through a lot, health-wise, and that continues until now (but I finally started a treatment). It was hell, and it still is sometimes, and whenever I feel "well", I take a moment to stop whatever I'm doing and say thank you. I wonder if that's how the ancients felt? If that sentiment was behind every votive carved, every lock of hair and strip of cloth left on her statue?

Hygieidora the robot vacuum brings the safety Hygieia promises, every time I empty its dust compartment I am in awe at how much I could've been inhaling. Yes, here too! In Beirut, my room is always the one to get dusty first. Must be because of all of the old books...

Wire Scriptorium

Before everything became feeds and stories, there was GeoCities: millions of people building their first "home on the Internet." It trained a generation in basic HTML, which carried on in other places ly Myspace. People posted family photos, curated lists of favorite links, built memorial pages for lost loved ones, people and pets all the same. It was messy, full of blinkies and adoptable pets and construction GIFs and auto-playing music and sound effects...

Making a website is entirely different than using social media; on X/Twitter, you have to pay for highlights! Here, I get to pick the categories that I want. I can't add audio to my Instagram profile, so I've been coping by using David Lynch songs on 90% of my stories.

A personal site feels like building a room instead of shouting from on top of a building and hoping someone listens: the walls stay put, the furniture doesn't reorder itself or disappear overnight, and nothing vanishes because I accidentally hit refresh. Posts can be long, strange, unfinished, overly specific, images only, a block of emojis, as many links as I like. The internet used to be made of places like mine, each with its own logic andarbitrary rules (or none at all), and it’s still possible to live that way if you choose it. Yes, it probably won't get you a brand deal, but it's a fun way to learn how to code and also to be aware of the issues social media has today and how we can fix them.

A website is portable in a way social media never is: you can download it anywhere, back it up, fork it, move it, mirror it, strip it down, change it up entirely. If a platform changes its rules, your site doesn’t have to; your aesthetic remains the way you want it, it's not dictated by random UI changes (yes, I still miss the old Instagram).

If you’ve been meaning to start your own but you feel overwhelmed... one page is enough. A homepage, a few links, a place to post stuff, a portfolio. It'll grow on its own into a veritable digital garden.