{"id":513,"date":"2015-04-24T22:08:41","date_gmt":"2015-04-25T05:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/?p=513"},"modified":"2015-08-14T11:14:35","modified_gmt":"2015-08-14T18:14:35","slug":"boy-the-latest-entry-in-my-journal-is-a-doozy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/boy-the-latest-entry-in-my-journal-is-a-doozy\/","title":{"rendered":"Boy, The Latest Entry in my Journal is a Doozy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I started writing seriously I\u2019ve been keeping a journal of interesting physical sensations and unusual experiences. It\u2019s usually things like freezing my face off in -40\u00b0 weather and what it feels like to defrost afterwards, or the incredibly specific pain of a pinched nerve. However, the other day I recorded one hell of an experience: a full on hypnopompic hallucination.<\/p>\n

It started when terrible sound filled my dream, a voice yelling \u201cPAT PAT PAT PAT<\/strong>\u2026\u201d It was Dalek-like, like a man yelling into a voice modulator. The sound confused me more than anything, until I saw an old-fashioned hunting party ride through my backyard carrying bazookas on their shoulders. The image was silly enough to make me realize it was a dream and wake myself up. But the sound didn\u2019t stop.<\/p>\n

I pinned the sound on my boyfriend. He wasn\u2019t so much snoring as making little puffs of air, but my brain converted it into the reverberating shout:<\/p>\n

({(PAT)}) ({(PAT)}) ({(PAT)})<\/strong> <\/strong>({(PAT)}) ({(PAT)}) ({(PAT)}) ({(PAT)}) <\/strong>({(PAT)})<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was creepy and terrifying, more-so because it accompanied visual hallucinations.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A grid, a dotted line of tiny shimmering spots, filled my entire visual field. In each grid-square a kaleidoscopic circle throbbed with colorful patterns. There were at least a hundred of these blobs, each one filled with a different, shifting non-Euclidian pattern. It took me a whole day to remember the specific word for them: Poincar\u00e9 disks, a form of hyperbolic geometry. How my brain came up with not just one, but hundreds of them, will probably remain a mystery to the end of my days. Such a neural event is weird in the Cosmic sense, or at least feels that way.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never hallucinated quite like that \u2013 not even on bad meds. My only guess was migraine aura, though mine have always been strictly auditory and not visual. In any case, I got up and chugged a glass of water to make sure my brain was hydrated, hoping a headache wouldn\u2019t come crashing down on me. I was lucky, and managed to fall back asleep pain-free. Before I did, as I curled under the covers and closed my eyes, the visual aura had calmed to something slightly less trippy. The grid tightened, becoming a diaphanous net of luminous undulating lines. The Poincar\u00e9 disks had disappeared, though the net itself had a rather hyperbolic form.<\/p>\n

Freaked out as I was, the writer part of me was going, \u201cYesss, fresh material for the novel!\u201d Because of course my protagonist lives in a more-or-less constant state of altered consciousness. You may be surprised to learn that I\u2019ve never done psychotropic drugs \u2013 but mostly because my brain is strange enough without them. Sometimes it\u2019s even too strange for me.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since I started writing seriously I\u2019ve been keeping a journal of interesting physical sensations and unusual experiences. It\u2019s usually things like freezing my face off in -40\u00b0 weather and what it feels like to defrost afterwards, or the incredibly specific pain of a pinched nerve. However, the other day I recorded one hell of an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[32,23,39,38],"class_list":["post-513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-creativity","tag-health","tag-weird","tag-what-im-working-on"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":516,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions\/516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}