... and, apparently, I hallucinate.
Tuesday night I really came down with teh Sick, and spent the better part of Lauren's annual St. Patrick's Day feast reclining, with a cool rag on my face, barely following conversation or events around me. Eventually, I had to leave altogether, and went upstairs to lie down in bed.
That night I didn't so much sleep as lose consciousness between bouts of delirium. The hallucinations went on for several hours, and as weird as it may sound, they felt absolutely real, as though I had made fundamental realizations about the nature of the world.
What happened was I lost entirely any sense of my personality or of having an ego or will. At first I struggled against this, and it was nauseating to feel - because it was a feeling, not an abstract idea.*
Instead, I was forced to recognize that I was a moving part, a necessary part that had to do its job, in a machine that makes illness. A machine part clearly has no ego or will, and although I had a bizarre memory of having once been rational and autonomous, I eventually became convinced this was a mistake, that I had always been a part in this machine, that this machine always was an illness-machine, and that I had somehow been wired up wrongly before. This convincing wasn't dialogical or logical, it was the convincing that happens as a result of a machine repeating the same mechanical motions over and over again.
Accepting that was strangely calming, and by around 2 or 3 in the morning (I guess), I was able to sleep.
By around noon, I started to feel human again. Last night I slept, not particularly well, and dreamed, rather than hallucinated. Much better.
* From what I've been able to gather, I'm a rare dreamer who dreams not only in color, but with all senses - particularly smell and taste. I also dream in abstract ideas, and once dreamt Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
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