Still Alive
Day two of my thrilling bronchitis adventure! I went to bed early last night, laid there half asleep. Eric Miller called at 10:30. I couldn't take the lying there and coughing so I swallowed some NyQuil and fell asleep. For about an hour. I had this frustrating dream in which I kept turning over and over, trying to set up some sort of convection current in the blankets to re-direct the flow of sweat. At midnight I woke up; WIDE AWAKE and sat up like Nosferatu rising from his coffin. I was soaked with sweat, and angry. I started cussing and kicked off the blankets. Convection currents, that's so f-ing stupid. I sat up for several minutes to let my t-shirt dry, and then laid back down. It was raining, and I could hear drops hitting the window. It made me think of the motion of molecules, colliding with each other, and I got a sense of my room as a cubical space above me, full of energized particles. I, too, was made up of particles: protons, neutrons, electrons, atoms whirling around and colliding with each other. It seemed like a cloud of wet electricity, a tangle of fine wires with a current running through it. I had been struggling against it, trying to lick it or squeeze something out of it, or trying to move inside it. Trying to change my position relative to it, but now that I could sense it, I realized there was no difference between it and me, and that movement was impossible. In fact, as I lay there I couldn't understand what I had been trying to do with the blankets and the sweat. My body was an illusion, and the fact that it was sick was just another degree of fiction. It was impossible to change my position or my condition within the cloud of energy because I was part of it, and my identity as an individual, seperate being was a lie. I laid there, opening my eyes and staring at the ceiling, then closing them again, trying to convince myself that my body was real, that the room was real, but it JUST DIDN'T MAKE ANY SENSE! Then I started coughing and the pain sort of brought me back. It was eerie. But my fever broke, and the rest of the night I spent sleeping fitfully for an hour, then waking up to pull another blanket onto the bed because I was cold.