The creature that possibly wasn't there.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was very tired and nauseous, I noticed an object on the floor beside the sofa. It was about two and a half inches long and folded in half. At first I thought it was a scrap of food so I picked it up off the floor before realising it was some sort of creature.

This bug had stubby legs like a caterpillar, with a pale papery body (suggesting it had been dead for a while) and a bright orange pointy face. It was a little gruesome, actually, but incredibly big. I decided to keep it to show [...] when he woke up so I put it on a tissue (since I didn't want to handle it any more), and took it into the kitchen.

When I got to the kitchen, I glanced down at the tissue to find that there was no creature, only a drop of red blood, about the size of penny. Rather alarmed that I had dropped this strange thing and might stand on it, I went back over the four metres I had walked from the sofa. And there was no sign of it. I looked again. I came back to the tissue and that was still there and still had the blood on it.

I looked the creature up in our insect book and then on-line. No joy. The closest thing in terms of size and colouring would perhaps be stag beetle larva (like this - click on at own risk), but it would be totally the wrong shape. It would appear that this bug is a species as yet unknown to man.

Hmm. I held the thing as well as looking at it close up. And any spell I was under would have been broken when I was on my feet; i.e. when I ought to have been reasonably awake. And yet I really can't work it out. And to be honest, it has shaken me up. I have seen, heard, felt and smelt some entirely imaginary things in my time, but nothing quite as complicated as this.

The blood bit isn't that odd. I bleed a lot without knowing it; I bleed very easily and I'm always bashing or scratching myself in the normal course of the day. It is perhaps an indicator of my bewildered state that I didn't give myself a thorough examination to see whether I was bleeding at the time. I was more concerned about the vanishing creature than the blood.

I can also lose things which are right in front of me. That does happen from time to time. Last week I needed the scissors to open a carton of milk to make a cup of tea and had turned half the house upside down before realising they were right next to the kettle. However, when [...] woke up I asked him to look and if he didn't find it, it isn't there.

It seems unlikely a grub or caterpillar could have got into the room it was in. There's no plants in here, nor are there plants right close to the window. Also, it was just too big. We don't get enormous caterpillars in these parts.

However, it really doesn't make any sense; there is no way I was asleep, because I had the tissue as evidence of my journey into the kitchen. And there was just too much visual detail I absorbed about the thing. Even if I had taken a double dose of painkiller by mistake, or even if I had eaten something perculiar (I was unusually nauseous but I'd only had some cereal, crackers and fruit all day) that is way too much.

Still, I am somewhat discombobulated.