Theme
7:29am
August 4, 2015
My brain refuses to see delirium as 100% meaningless.
One of the things that sucks about being delirious is how little meaning things seem to have some of the time – most of the time, even. When I’m delirious, it feels like I’m in a world of edges, never reaching any depths, just surfaces, and seeing all kinds of dizzying reflections in the surfaces, with my mind chasing them around in circles, unable to keep up or comprehend anything other than fragments of reality. It’s a terrible, empty feeling. And it’s weird because my head is outright cluttered, generally (unless it’s the kind of delirium where everything just fades away, instead of becoming cluttery and hallucinatory) and yet there’s nothing there. There’s just nothing to anything.
And after awhile that gets to me. After awhile I start wondering, is every time that I’m delirious, time wasted, time I’ll never get back, time that’s utterly meaningless in the worst possible way? Especially when it’s filled with hallucinations and delusions that have nothing to do with reality at all.
And yet every single time I’ve been delirious, I’ve also had moments where instead of too little meaning, suddenly everything drops out from under me, and… well in the comic I made, I represented it with a lioness, but that was a symbolic way of getting at something deeper. So even though delirium mostly takes me as far away from reality as you can get, there’s also these weird moments where it suddenly takes me towards reality in a huge way that I can’t ignore.
But all of these things, whether they’re about taking my mind towards reality or away from it – they’re about what my mind experiences. And reality isn’t dependent on whether I notice it at the time or not. And I continue to exist just as much when I’m totally confused, as I do when I’m not confused at all. That includes during times that my brain doesn’t even encode memories from. It doesn’t mean I’m not there, or that what’s happening to me at the time doesn’t matter.
But even with all that – I just get this intense desire to make sure that these parts of my life have some kind of meaning to them, even though everything seems so meaningless so much of the time while they’re going on. Maybe it’s because of that horrible empty meaningless feeling, that I insist on there being some kind of meaning in sight even then. I don’t know. I don’t even know how to say what I’m trying to say.
8 notes
3:55am
April 26, 2015
Delirium dreams, and question about objects not behaving as they should in dreams
Hither and yon [E E E E–]
Thither and yon [B B B B–]
Hither and yon [E E E E–]
Thither and yon [B B B B–]
Hither and yon [E E E E–]
Thither and yon [B B B B–]
Hither and yon [E E E E–]
Thither and yon [B B B B–]
Hither and thither [E E E E E–]
And yon and yon [B B– B B–]
And hither and thither [E E E E E E–]
And yon and yon [B B– B B–]
And hither and thither [E E E E E E–]
And yon and yon [B B– B B–]
And hither and thither [E E E E E E–]
And yon and yon [B B– B B–]
Repeat infinitely and rapidly in a chorus of bass voices, with cartoonish things that look like men in top hats but ain’t so, in repetitive motion coming from the hats, and you could get one of my delirium dreams from the hospital.
I don’t know why I find things like this scarier than nightmares of the usual sort, but I do. A lot of my more ordinary nightmares still have to do with ordinary objects not behaving in ordinary ways. My brother told me he once had a, nightmare where turning off the tv with the off knob wouldn’t turn it off and neither would unplugging it. I instantly knew why that was terrifying. More terrifying than getting chased by zombies, which has happened to me a couple times in dreams.
Also note #actuallydelirious tag. Because the #delirium and #delirious tags are full of delirium as a metaphor, or else references to the Neil Gaiman character Delirium.
Posted to #actuallyautistic because I’m curious if the kind of dream my brother had is an autism-specific form of nightmare, a neurodivergent-specific kind of nightmare, or a nightmare no matter who has it. I have reasons to wonder if dreams of objects behaving in ways they shouldn’t are scarier to autistic than nonautistic people, but no evidence either way.
3:59am
May 1, 2014
➸ The Scarf -- A Comic About Delirium
This is not a BADD post. It’s just a post I’m making for people who might have wondered. And people who didn’t wonder, but might want to know. And people who might have experienced something lik…
If anyone hasn’t read the comic before (which is not a literal recounting of the experience, see the linked post for details on why), I posted a link to the PDF link on my other blog, since I seem to be making a million blog posts there today. It’s not really a BADD post. Here’s the reasons I posted it, cut and pasted from the post:
There’s two things that I hope about this comic:
1. That it can express something of what I went through. Because it was one of the most profoundly isolating and lonely experiences of my entire life. It seriously felt like going into the underworld or something, and after I came back I felt like that world was all over me and I couldn’t break through to the world that everyone else was in. And nobody could talk to me about it, and nobody could offer any advice, and I felt like I still had a foot in that other-world for over a year. And like nobody could really see me, because I was in that other-world, and I couldn’t see anyone else, because I wasn’t in their world, and it was very frightening and isolating and I most of the time had no words to articulate any of it. Except occasional bursts of almost-poetry. But it felt like whenever I said anything, people just stayed silent, they didn’t know what to say or how to respond, and that made me feel even more distant and frozen and dead. Also whenever I was hospitalized or sick I’d fall back into delirium even more easily and that didn’t help either. Writing this comic was the first way I felt I could express any of that feelingin a big way.
2. Even more so, I hope that if anyone else has gone through anything like this, that it speaks to them in some way. That’s the other reason I’m posting it here. My friend urged me to make it public for the sake of people who might be feeling the same isolation.