Frame of mind

I have been sick as hell the past week with some kind of demonic nanotech futuristic magical evil necromancer spawned flu.  The first part of it was the worst as it entailed the age old question "Which end of me do I need to point at the toilet for the next 30 seconds?" and that is pretty much the worst time there is.  In the last few days though I have only had a modest cold in terms of physical symptoms but the brain effects have been *interesting*.

I often feel fairly high when I have a cold.  Weird thrumming underneath my kneecaps, temporal discontinuities, frame of reference shifts, and other facets of the cold are very much in keeping.  One thing that I have had friends describe as a part of being high that I never experienced myself though is extreme paranoia.  I don't get anxiety or paranoia issues in regular life at all - it just isn't an issue I deal with.  What that might have to do with feeling that while under a cold high I don't know but the last couple nights I got it in a big way.

Between sleep and awake I found a very bizarre place where I was dreaming but not quite.  I could wake up at will and be as functional as one would expect from a sick person but as soon as I lay back down images would flood my mind and everything seemed to be wrong.  I was certain I had done everything incorrectly, let everyone down, forgotten all the things that needed doing.  Things weren't totally out of control though and I would constantly reach to try to fix all the swirling disasters around me only to fail over and over.  The world was unfamiliar, frightening, and all things were off kilter by just enough that I could never feel relaxed.

I spent many hours in this state, often waking up to verify that I could still do so, then lying down again hoping for sleep to claim me.  I finally did sleep but only once dawn was ready to break in the morning.  You would think that such a bizarre mindset that never really touched sleep would leave me hideously tired and unhappy in the morning but it was not so.  I feel slightly tired, I know my sleep was not ideal, and I recognize that I passed hours in the grip of terror and yet things are fine.  Somehow all that madness actually did bridge the gap between restorative sleep and being awake.

What I can say for certain is that I have had enough of this cold high.  I want my brain back now.  I want to be able to think properly, I want to be able to sleep properly, and I want to be able to properly delineate the border between sleep and awake because not being able to do so is a teensy bit strange.