Oops inside my head

A much better week with decidedly less pain. The haze is a challenge, but it is not insurmountable. The biggest issue is one of deception; I am much less able to trust what seems to be going on around me. However, I've been through very similar side-effects before and never been quite so bright with it as I seem to be now. There's drowsiness, but even that is deceptive; it's more like a mist between me and the world as opposed to anything which stops me thinking. I think. There is the possibility that my head is full of nonsense only I haven't realised it.

If I'm honest, I find the side-effects quite interesting. It's not fun; I'm not high. In fact my mood does seem to be swinging about a wee bit. But the mild hallucinatory effects are curious. My brain is basically attempting to fill in the gaps as all brains do all the time - all of us with two eyes have a gap in our visual field which many people never notice (whereas others use it to decapitate people who are irritating us, if they are at the right distance). And beyond this, we use our imaginations to make sense of things. For example, you're not actually registering all the letters in this sentence, but just the shape of the words (unless any are unfamiliar to you). Often when we see something that doesn't make complete sense, our brains make it into something that does.

Just now, my brain is filling in more gaps than actually exist. I believe the thing with the insects is a very common experience; every slight movement registered towards the edge of my visual field becomes an identifiable insect, at least for a second. I imagine most people have experienced thinking they saw a fly or spider when it was probably a flicker or light or a spec of dust on the surface of the eye. Except this is distracting me several times a day. Meanwhile, every bit of noise I'm registering seems to be voices - I'm not hearing voices, but I'm hearing the sound of people talking or singing elsewhere in the house, and there's nobody there.

There must have been a slight change in the smell of the air as I entered the kitchen and I was convinced - as well as somewhat confused and annoyed - that [...] was using glass-cleaner to clean the oven. Glass cleaner is a horrible stinky chemical and my nostrils were full of the stuff. But when I asked, he insisted that he was only using warm water and the smell went away.

Nothing too dramatic, at least not during the day. Nights are another matter. I don't know whether the drugs are causing me to have vivid and traumatic dreams or perhaps I'm happening to have a phase. Trouble is that I wake up a few times every night and I seem to become conscious some minutes before I stop dreaming. This is actually quite frightening if I need the loo; if I stay in bed with these odd things happening around me, then I feel fairly safe - I know I am awake and this is the stuff of dreams. If I get up, then I am very nervous of what I might see or hear; I'm nervous of being startled, of screaming or falling over because of something that isn't there.

After all, there was that dead body on the floor in the dark at the end of my bed. It even felt solid when I kicked it (I confess to having very little respect for the dead when they are inexplicably on my bedroom floor), but then when I knelt down and touched it, it was gone again.

That might sound far more distressing than it was; fact is, if you really did find a dead body on your bedroom floor, confusion would be the initial response. It would probably take some moments before you felt the full horror of the situation and before those moments were over, I had established that it wasn't really there.

On the plus side, I have been able to manipulate these night-time semi-somulant experiences ever so slightly. Just to see if I could, I imagined there was a thick fur rug beside my bed, reached down and drew my fingers through it - and it was, it was fur, very thick, soft and silky to touch (the bedroom carpet is quite the opposite). If I could master control of this stuff it would be seriously cool, but that seems rather unlikely. Most of it is, alas, just filling in the gaps.