Tour of a migraine -- $.50 version
I spent Sunday in an altered state of consciousness that if it weren't for the steel spike through my head many people would have paid good money to have experienced. Maybe even have paid good money to experience. But as this is a public forum, "I wouldn't know about such things, nope nope nope," is the official story.

There seems to be a point where, after pain becomes merely debilitating, you come out the other side. Out some other side.

I dreamed. I would say "hallucinated", but my eyes were closed most of the time and I wasn't exactly conscious. Hard to draw that line.

At one point I saw a landscape composed of fractally geometric spiky features, neon-bright, ice-blue and ice-translucent. This place had nothing to do with me. I didn't interact with it. But I was there for an incalculable while. The texture and scope (how much field of vision it took up) and color scheme pulsed and modulated, as did the structures I watched. For the most part I felt like I was above it, sometimes felt like I was looking at it through a microscope -- or a telescope. Not a lot of this stuff stuck in my head. I can't describe the soundtrack. Kaleidoscopic is a good word. So is synaesthesia. Unfortunately, hours and hours of adjectives would be a good deal more boring for you than the actual experience was for me.

In a more dream-like sequence, I remember a scene at a place that was important to me as a child -- the church I attended until I was seventeen. Nothing religious was taking place, though, and I didn't really place it as the church parking lot until just now. It was off-scale. Too large. Some carnival was in full swing and the place (and surrounding city) was being wrecked by huge (sky-scraper-sized) vaguely anthropomorphic forms. Many had tentacles for limbs. I remember being more "put out" than really afraid. It agitated me into a near-panic when one swatted too close for comfort, but it bugged me more that everyone else was definitely panicking and no one would help me get to the toy store. This theme continued through several scenes. Until I got a ride to the next scene. I think I drove the old red convertible myself with the faceless owner in the back seat, at least at first....

After that there was some driving through a city-scape on raised highways that seemed to be badly drawn. We were going in circles and I felt like I could steer our car to better-drawn roads if I could call the directions, but I was mostly ignored -- until I pretended not to be rattled entirely when we repeatedly nearly fell through ripped-up sections of pavement -- and then the person at the wheel agreed to follow my directions. I eventually got us off the road entirely by deliberately taking a nasty-looking gap in the highway onto quickly-sketched packed clay and we drove to some field at the back of some beach-front resort....

At one point I was in the toy section of a beach/pool-oriented tourist-trap slightly too large to be considered a convenience store. I was building a weapon to fight the ectoplasmic monstrosities. I remember I had collected some modeling clay and some bubble-blowing liquid soap and some large-ish plastic tubular material (textured with rings of alternately large and small diameters, like a bendy-straw on serious steroids and "bendy" for the whole yellow length) associated with the bubble-gunk. I think I found some magnetic marbles and was sending someone else out for some insulated wire and some old wire coat-hangers for structure. I remember I was vaguely satisfied that I had an idea that would work....

I remember having little patience with queries like, "What the fuck are you up to?" and "What will that do?" and "Are you sure this will work?"

I remember fighting some smaller monster or other in a clearing in the woods, standing on the trunk of the convertible, slinging the doctored tube to launch some soapy, clay-wrapped magnetic marble-thingy through the wire-wrapped tube, the wires on the tube connected to an old car-battery that wouldn't stay connected on a vigorous swing, not to mention that the tube was too soapy to hold onto properly until I found the work gloves in the trunk. But in the end it worked -- wherever a missile hit, an enormous chunk of the creature was messily disrupted, usually taking off a limb. I was a poor shot too, as I recall.

There was more, unrelated to this apparently threaded sequence -- and I can't really guarantee that this was the sequence in which I dreamed the scenes I described.

There was plenty more. I took a shower at one point, and read some of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, loaned to me by orpheusrabbit (I'm into chapter 20 of book 3), but the pain surged again and put me back down. I ate a few crackers and peanut butter and drank water before I hit the futon again. After sleeping until noon on Sunday, I was back horizontal in bed (truth to tell, I never left it except to shower) by 3:00 PM.

At some point my roommate and her boyfriend showed up to commit some olfactory felony in the kitchen (all of my senses get heightened during a migraine -- and I wasn't in good enough condition to drag myself downstairs to complain -- and I sure as hell wasn't going to shout). By the time I was smelling it, I was pretty much screwed. I just rode it out. When they left, they took whatever it was with them -- I could find no sign of it in the kitchen this morning. I know they had come and gone, though. They left other signs. But the smell put me in my own little hell for a while. I finally managed to reengineer the airflow in my room to overpressure it so no air could come in from the hallway or bathroom. Or I guess that was why the AC window unit was on fan-only and vented the way it was. I still have no idea where the floor-fan came from. It doesn't look familiar at all, either from my stuff or from my roommates.... The air-directing geometry was all mine, though. And the fan was pretty old-looking -- second-hand dusty and not exactly current era.

I guess I just pulled the fan out of my pocket. I'm sure there's a retroactive explanation waiting somewhere. I stuck the fan in the linen closet in the bathroom. (Have I seen it in there before? It's starting to feel familiar already...) If I remember, I'll ask the roommate about it. I certainly don't remember getting up to find a fan. And I do remember when my roommate and her boyfriend left again. No living person came into my room....

There was tons more dreaming -- the kind of vivid, disjointed stuff I usually don't get unless I have a fever. Some of it was weirdly sensual -- a kind of all-over bath in glassy icy (but not uncomfortable) pellets, colored in flame-oranges and flame-yellows, flowing quickly over my naked body. I remember the sensation of other presences. I remember partially waking up, but upon determining that the sense of other was fading, consciously re-immersing myself in dream. The presences occurred one or two at a time -- one in contact and one distant when there were two -- and I believe that if I were forced to, I could put names with the presences -- but at this point I would prefer not to.

I gave a message to one of them that I would prefer get returned to me before I make any definitive statements about the presences.

I talked at length with all of the presences, a running narration of something or other (regarding more stuff I don't care to discuss yet) with one or two of them, pleasantries with others, and a message (password?) for one I apparently didn't expect to meet. All of this was at the same time as some of the more positive kaleidoscopic experiences towards the end of the migrainous sequences and before the more ignorable stuff in the wee hours of this morning.

I was wrung out this morning. I'm still in a haze -- as if the storm that generated the migraine has merely wandered off into another part of my head and is still stirring up dust and generating an indescribably subjective analogy to that wet-dust-and-ozone smell of a recently passed -- or immanent -- outbreak. I say indescribable, but if you combine the terms "jittery" and "fuzzy" and "staticky" with "tornado nearby -- but where you can't see it -- maybe already passed but could come back", you start getting close.

I guess it's time to visit my doctor again. I'm all out of the really good stuff I used to keep on hand to fend off the bad ones when I felt them coming on. And they are starting to get more frequent again. It's a sign of stress. Or something.

The time sequences for this entry are all cracked up and shuffled. I guess that's appropriate. Either that or I don't feel like fixing it.

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