A Beautiful Mind

Ugh. Just when life couldn't get anymore complicated, I decide to become either a medium or a paranoid schizophrenic.

My weird dreams just reached an entirely new level of strangeness. It began with just an idea and nothing visual. I was dead. (It's always a good sign when you're dead before the dream even starts!) How do I describe it? Being dead feels something like the half-consciousness you feel when your roommate/lover/spouse's alarm goes off, and even though you never actually wake up, you are "aware" that they are getting dressed, brushing their teeth, etc. I was "aware" that I was dead but didn't really mind. I was also "aware" that I'd been cut clean in half across the midriff and placed in a stone sarcophagus in the middle of a forest. Time passes... I'm not sure how much... but I get a vague feeling that I'm being miraculously put back together. Suddenly, I wake up as if from sleeping (disoriented, but not upset or disturbed to be in a tomb!), push the lid aside, and step out.

While my subconscious is probably trying to tell me something very mundane with colorful imagery, there's always that tiny chance that I just predicted the second coming. Start building your bomb shelters.

Now to the really scary part.

For the last few months, I've been suffering from progressively more severe "hallucinations". They started as innocent drops of light. Then the lights went away, and I started seeing big black beetles. Now the beetles are gone and I see people. Not moving, regular people. Like, shadows of people. I don't "hear voices" or anything like that, but it's still fairly disconcerting.

As you can imagine, I have PLENTY of theories. My honest belief is that (especially around this time of year!) my sinuses are sometimes putting too much pressure on my eyes and making me "see" things. Similar to the things people sometimes "see" during a migraine. Theory number two is that I have a sleeping disorder. I'm getting a full eight hours every night, but I rarely wake up rested. This could account for my lively REM sleep too! Theory three: the obvious brain tumor thing. I doubt that one since I haven't had any headaches. Theory four: I'm slipping into paranoid schizophrenia. Unfortunately, I happen to be the right age for that. Theory five: that there's black mold in my house that's making me see things. Theory five is actually more fuel for theory four than an actual theory in and of itself. Finally, theory six: that I'm getting in touch with my inner John Edwards. I'm refusing for it to be theory six, since I've always maintained that there is no such thing as ghosts. And I hate to be wrong.

So we'll see what happens. I can probably work a movie deal out of most of the possibilities.