#actuallydelirious

[withasmoothroundstone]

It's almost more unsettling than out-and-out delirium.

It's like the world of delirium lurks just out of sight somewhere and I see it in half glimpses. Sometimes very apparent and sometimes barely apparent. Sometimes most apparent when sleeping. But as if it's just out of sight, just around the corner somewhere, waiting. This doesn't always lead to true delirium but it does generally mean something's wrong with my body. Right now I've been dealing with months of infections, antibiotics, surgery, feeding tube malfunctions (with accompanying trouble related to getting medication, water, and food in adequate amounts), a fairly bad fall, and the combination of physical and emotionall stress with adrenal insufficiency (and the steroids that accompany that). So it makes sense this would be happening, but it's eerie.

[withasmoothroundstone]

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.

[autiequotes]

“The world can be a bitter place of bitter winds that chill your soul, but to turn away from what causes pain is to close the world out, beauty and all.” -Donna Williams

When I started coming out of the delirium, it meant I felt more pain because I was more in the real world and was about to have a nasty stomach virus take over my body. But at some point I made a conscious choice that the real world was better than being trapped in a waking nightmare and possibly dying. So I chose reality. This reminds me of that. It took everything in me to fight the urge to run away again.

[withasmoothroundstone]

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.