Febrile Hallucinations

I've been battling bug lately. It manifested as a brutal fever which, I'm quite convinced, gave me febrile hallucinations. I've never had such an experience. I was sick in bed trying to sleep when this horrible dream began. I dreamed that I was in a bureaucratic vicious circle, and that I was in charge of 'fixing the phones and making sure the wheelchairs worked.' I would wake up often because of the fever and felt my blankets becoming more and more drenched in sweat. Too weak and chilled to get up for water or a pill, I shut my eyes and tried to slip back to sleep.

Phones. Wheelchairs. Wake up. Sweaty blankets. Repeat. It was exhausting. I felt as though I had been working hard, physically and mentally, when I should have been resting. This made me frustrated on top of everything else. My heart rate was 90 bpm, racing as though I was doing heavy physical labour.




In my dream I began to construct an elaborate structure out of phone cables and wheelchair parts. It looked like junkyard art and was extremely complex. If my brain was a computer, the amount of detail going into this fruitless activity would have maxed out my RAM. I climbed up atop the structure and lay upon it, and then woke up. I couldn't tell where I was. Was I still atop the junk pile? I spread my hands out over my mattress to convince myself that I was awake and only suffering a bad dream. A drip of sweat dropped off my earlobe.

I was suddenly overtaken with an urgency to get back into my dream to continue the futile work I was assigned to. Part of me knew that it was just a dream and that I was not accomplishing anything, but the other was OBSESSING about getting the job done. The line separating reality and fantasy was becoming blurred. I was slipping in and out of consciousness, becoming more and more frustrated in and out of the dream of the exhausting and repetitive nature of what was happening to me, while at the same time becoming more obsessed with completing the task.

I finally had enough at 5 AM. I said out loud 'this is not real.' The psychotic sense of urgency wouldn't go away, so I began to repeat 'no. no. no!' I eventually gathered enough courage to get out of bed and get some water. I wore my housecoat and winter jacket to brave the 20C (68F) temperatures that my body deemed were frigid. After this, the problem was over.

I washed all my linens today and it cost me $6.