So I had a really interesting experience Monday night. I think I was hallucinating. Some definitions of hallucination seem to imply it’s only visual. I disagree, and luckily have found much better definitions that cover all of the senses. Here’s one:
A hallucination, in the broadest sense, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space.
<snip>
Hallucinations can occur in any sensory modality — visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, proprioceptive, equilibrioceptive, nociceptive, thermoceptive and perception of time.
I can’t remember the last time I had a really high fever, but Monday night I broke 102. It was 102.1 actually. Made my joints cramp up, and I was getting chills. Under blankets and wearing fleece top and bottom, I was still curling my toes from being cold.
Slept on/off from about 2pm Monday until 8am Tuesday.
So Monday night, I wake up and I’m getting ready to go upstairs and get off the couch. I got myself into a state of awake, but not awake. It’s as if both my conscious and unconscious minds were acting at the same time.
I knew I was awake, but I knew that I was asleep. How strange is that? I started talking to Jean about things at work. Both incomplete and complete thoughts about projects I was working on and problems I was having. She would tell me that she didn’t work with me and had no idea what I was talking about.
Then, immediately after saying it, I realized that I was making no sense, so I would apologize to her. I went so far as to tell her that I wasn’t making sense and that my mind was all foggy like I was dreaming, but I was sitting there awake and talking to her. She chuckled to herself. This went on for several minutes.
She should have recorded me, because it didn’t stop there. We went upstairs and I continued being loopy. Today, when I brought it up with her, she told me at points in the “conversation” I would look straight at her, with open eyes, and say something. She thought I was awake, because my eyes were open and what I said sounded coherent, but she didn’t know what I meant.
When she asked me what I meant, I would say “I have no idea”.
So I’m not sure if I was actually hallucinating that I was at work, or just somehow that my unconscious mind was wrapping into my conscious one and the crossover was complicating things. I would say it was like sleep-walking, but instead sleep-talking. But then how do I explain the fact that I was able to *know* I was being weird at the time I was doing it?
Really kinda trippy if you ask me. Took some Tylenol. The fever finally broke. Spend much of Tuesday with a negative fever (hovered around 97 for most of the day). Finally last night came back to normal.