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Sick :(, and hallucinations?, and moving plans
Devon gave me the cold he picked up when traveling around for work training. :( It wasn't so bad when it was a gentle cough and aching joints—it that that cozy-sick vibe. But it has since graduated to congestion, and because I have no known immune system as result of depression + never interacting with flesh people, it's hitting me way harder than it did Dev. :((( Antihistamines help with the congestion and help keep me unconscious on my reclining pile of pillows for 12+ hrs/day. I refuse to take pseudoephedrine; I'm susceptible to mood-altering side effects, and "central nervous system stimulation, insomnia, nervousness, excitability, dizziness and anxiety" is a hard DNW even if being sick is outweighing being anxious about life changes. I know complaining about a common cold is boring but I still am sad! :((
* * *
I've also been having hallucinations for the last week or two?? I'm hesitant to call them hallucinations because they're very much that thing where your brain tries to pattern match for partial information. But it's been happening a lot. I've seen gray blur = greyhound, dot of light = glowing eyes of a black dog, moving dot = spider (this one a lot! why!), black blur = cat, and heard a man say, "hey, what's up?" so distinctly that I had to make sure I wasn't in voice on Discord.
In the past I've taught myself to interpret similar stimuli as my black dog beastie, to help build & reinforce my comfort/nightmare/embodied metaphor. So in a way this feels like a success and is more interesting and reaffirming than it is scary. (Except the spiders.) But it's still for me super unusual to have this happen more than once a month or so. I chock this up to significant stress compounded by fatigue.
Is this what a hallucinations are, or do they need to be more concrete and sustained? What's the link between hallucinations and aphantasia—the interpretations are definitely brain-side, and what I'm actually seeing is peripheral blurs or movement, but where are those elements coming from? Is it just the result of slow processing (on account of stress, etc) that makes my eyes confused and provides inadequate information to my brain? ?? How do brain work?
* * *
Because of Dev's work scheduling, we're doing the actual move on Friday (the 5th) instead of our move-in date of Wednesday (the 3rd). This is the right call—it gives us three days to do a lot of errands/loading/driving/unloading/errands instead of something like one day in the middle of the week to try to manage an impossible number of things. It was still crushing to realize I'd spend another two days here. But the cold is a blessing; it makes time move in an endless long blur—not faster, but less real.
But that feeling that things are so close to being done except for this last hurdle, this one more delay just ... haunts me until the very end.
* * *
I've also been having hallucinations for the last week or two?? I'm hesitant to call them hallucinations because they're very much that thing where your brain tries to pattern match for partial information. But it's been happening a lot. I've seen gray blur = greyhound, dot of light = glowing eyes of a black dog, moving dot = spider (this one a lot! why!), black blur = cat, and heard a man say, "hey, what's up?" so distinctly that I had to make sure I wasn't in voice on Discord.
In the past I've taught myself to interpret similar stimuli as my black dog beastie, to help build & reinforce my comfort/nightmare/embodied metaphor. So in a way this feels like a success and is more interesting and reaffirming than it is scary. (Except the spiders.) But it's still for me super unusual to have this happen more than once a month or so. I chock this up to significant stress compounded by fatigue.
Is this what a hallucinations are, or do they need to be more concrete and sustained? What's the link between hallucinations and aphantasia—the interpretations are definitely brain-side, and what I'm actually seeing is peripheral blurs or movement, but where are those elements coming from? Is it just the result of slow processing (on account of stress, etc) that makes my eyes confused and provides inadequate information to my brain? ?? How do brain work?
* * *
Because of Dev's work scheduling, we're doing the actual move on Friday (the 5th) instead of our move-in date of Wednesday (the 3rd). This is the right call—it gives us three days to do a lot of errands/loading/driving/unloading/errands instead of something like one day in the middle of the week to try to manage an impossible number of things. It was still crushing to realize I'd spend another two days here. But the cold is a blessing; it makes time move in an endless long blur—not faster, but less real.
But that feeling that things are so close to being done except for this last hurdle, this one more delay just ... haunts me until the very end.
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at any rate, sounds like fatigue, and i hope they go away once you can get enough rest.
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I do get hallucinations like that when I'm very fatigued or very stressed. I had a kind of... breakdown? ten years ago or so when I had much more extreme hallucinations, but what you're describing is all the happens to me now, and it's definitely influenced by stress.
I hope times moves as swiftly as possible this week <3
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(FWIW the cold mostly passed within 24 hour of complaining about it online; proof positive that complaining is a good and productive use of my time.)