Polyphasic Weirdities and On-Demand Hallucinations

As much as I try to feel normal on this sleeping schedule, I still encounter episodic weirdness. For example, to make myself feel normal, I go to bed at midnight and get up at 3 am. Lots of people go to bed at midnight; many get up at 3am. Yet wandering the halls at 4 am recently I felt like a private detective lurking in a long dark alleyway; or like a cop walking the beat in a precinct of one.

Along with my mucous membrane improvement (which by the way, continues, although I have accommodated the change to a great degree and no longer notice it as much), my hearing continues to retain a silky quality, making music so enjoyable, regardless of the amount of percussive content.

My eyes continue to play tricks on me - no longer sore, no longer tired, they are getting better than they have ever been. Only yesterday I was able to read the most minute print on a package of Tukmaria - with some difficulty but I did it. This is something I have not been able to do at all since having lasik surgery many years ago to correct my nearsightedness. On top of that, my eyes should be getting worse as I age - I should be getting more farsighted.

In the hotel hallway 3 days ago, I looked at my iPhone to read an article and the checkered patterned floor seemed to come right up above the iPhone in such brightness and sharp focus that I had to blink a few times to make it recede so I could read the display - but I failed. It stayed raised above the level of the display and commanded my attention with its brightness. I moved away, walking outside, and was then able to read the display.

But laying in bed after a nap two days ago, I was absent-mindedly staring at the rough-textured plaster ceiling when the surface of the plaster began to move, and flow, and shimmer and crawl and flow slowly like a living river of liquid insects. I thought for a moment that I had let my eyes wander and that had caused the vision, so I held my gaze and sharpened my focus to see if it would come more into focus or go away as I expected. With that became a beautifully sharp focused hallucination - clearly a hallucination because I knew in my mind that the ceiling was not flowing, and yet I could see it as if it were real; only my prior experience with ceilings in general told me it could not be real. I tested the extent of the hallucination by looking left, and it was less, but still observable, then up, and right, again less - it was strongest in the center. To test my theory I focused my mind to not see the hallucination, and it simply evaporated. I found myself staring at a simple, plain ceiling. To see if I could repeat it, I called for it again in my brain, and then slowly it returned over the course of 15 seconds, back with the same intensity as before. Clearly a part of my vision as if the receptors in my eyes were functioning differently on demand, but not a part of my mental perception because, to risk a pun, I could "see right through it" - it didn't fool me at all, yet I could see it in great detail. It wasn't disconcerting, nor annoying, it was really a curiosity, yet one which I did not really want to experience. So I stopped it again, and then went about cleaning myself up to see if I could easily maintain normal vision, which I did successfully without incident since. A half-hour after the incident, I tried once in the hallway to see if I could recall the hallucination in a different setting, but it didn't come back.

Just now my curiosity overcame me, and I stared at this ceiling in a new hotel to see if I could recall the hallucination. This ceiling is flat with pairs of vertical lines every 3 feet where the joins are, and this time the lines began to vibrate together and apart and the ripples that reach outware from the lines began to flow. The smooth parts of the ceiling did not move, so together with the geometric floor episode, it seems that the hallucinations are a hypersenstivity to high-contrast sharp lines.

Interesting.