FEVERS
In his book “Hallucinations,” Oliver Sacks writes about auditory and visual hallucinations, which are quite common, especially as we grow older. Most people don’t report them, though, as they are associated with mental illness and patients are afraid of being committed. Apparently, our brains are tricky, complicated things, and our perception is frequently wrong. We see things upside down and our brain turns them over. We have little crystals in our inner ear that can malfunction and cause us to lose our balance. We smell something, and are taken back to childhood. We don’t fully understand how our own brain works, and we are using the organ to understand itself. It’s a surprise we don’t hallucinate more often. It’s possible we do and keep it to ourselves. We think we see loved ones who are gone, smell food that’s not there, taste things as the mention of them. Peanut butter and jelly. Pizza. Chardonnay. Some philosophers believe we are living in an hallucination. As Shakespeare put it, “Life’s but a walking shadow,” said by Macbeth who saw an imaginary floating dagger, a ghost and couldn’t sleep.
I spent a lot of my time as a child waking up and turning my pillow over the cool side, hoping that would help me sleep. The pillow would always be hot, as if the action of my brain had actually heated it up. My mother would come in and asks what the problem was. I would tell her I can’t turn my brain off.
I have no idea what my three year-old self had to worry about, or what I would have been thinking, unlike now when I am kept awake either self-righteously defending myself against something someone said in passing ten years ago or practicing my Oscar speech. Who is that troubled at three? Normally you’d have to start school or be a member of a church and told you’re going to hell for life to be that worried. I don’t remember anything of that time in my life except playing hide and seek with other neighborhood kids as the sun set. I joke about worry being the Jewish birthright, so perhaps just some of us are born that way.
It’s possible I was a night person in a kid’s body, a body forced to go to sleep at 8 p.m.. I still have trouble pulling myself out of bed in the morning, no matter what time. With recent time change, even my dog looks up at me and wonders why we’re getting up so early. At least I have the right dog. He can sleep through anything. He vaguely raises his head when there are fireworks, and then goes back to sleep with a sigh. I’d like to be more like my dog, but nights are never that calm.
At eleven, I fantasized about taking a vacation from my brain. We had those seventies sunbathing chairs with multicolored rubber tubes that would click into place, the kind where if the chair back was pushed too far forward or too far back it had to be pushed all the way forward and pulled all the way back to reset the mechanism; it sounded like a roller coaster clicking up a track. I would imagine my brain in one of those chairs, then I would imagine my body in another, hopefully hosing down my brain to push out all the unwanted thoughts. Then I would worry that the chair backs would not align. Then it occurred to me that I would not survive and, indeed, if my brain were separated from my body, I would die. That was not the first disappointing end to a fantasy I imagined and not the last. There have been imaginary car crashes, shootings, arguments, fires, earthquakes.
My speeding brain sometimes felt hot, but I did have actual fevers. I was sick a lot. I had horrible strep throat infections a few times a year. In fact, I believe if I were born before the advent of all the cillins, pene-, amoxy-, and ampi-, I would have died before puberty. I would have fevers fairly often, sometimes very high temperatures. They would alter my perception. Things would seem tiny or large in my vision and change size when I picked them up. My paper would look very far away. The pencil I was holding would feel like a log. I would be in class and feel a change in perception, and sure enough I would go home and have a fever. Very Alice in Wonderland, but more the later part when she is terrorized by an insane monarch and fears for her life.
These fevers would occasion freezing baths, sitting alone in a tub of icy water hoping that I would stop the shivering and shaking. During one particularly bad fever in 5th grade I hallucinated an entire group. There was a horrible Nebraska snowstorm outside, and I went to bed. I woke up to several people in my room: an old woman clutching a purse, a movie star in a Marilyn Monroe like slinky dress, a nondescript office worker type, and a man on a pedestal at the foot of my bed yelling about taking over the world. I listened, as did the others, though they sometimes voiced their opinions. I finally meekly raised my hand to ask if I could go to the bathroom. “Yes, but make it quick,” he said. I remember nothing else but waking up the next morning in my bed, now in the middle of the room, with my digital clock blinking a red 12:00, having lost power during the storm. I don’t remember anyone seeing this as very remarkable, which speaks either to the frequency of my illnesses or the nonchalance of parents in the seventies — more than likely the former. If I’d been born in the nineteenth century, I doubt I’d have made it to my teens.
In my late twenties, I would roam the streets of New York late at night, fueled by alcohol, too restless to sleep, and come home to pass out. It wasn’t until my mid to late thirties that I could actually fall asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow. A guy I dated was a true insomniac, and would be up in the middle of the night, laying in bed, watching me toss and turn. I would tell him my dreams in the morning, and he’d humor me by listening to them.
I had my tonsils out when I was thirty and have not had strep since, and thankfully few fevers. They are still terrifying in some ways, though nothing gets larger or smaller. I have never had a fever high enough to hallucinate again, though sometimes that will happen waking from dreams. One night I saw rampaging Keith Haring dogs barking on the ceiling and was unsure if I was awake or not. It’s like an echo leaving your brain, like looking at a bright light that remains once you’ve closed your eyes, but it can still be wondrous. I’ve seen beautiful patterns that take over the whole room, and have to blink several times to clear my field of vision.
I don’t have a problem falling asleep anymore, but I have complicated dreams that I often wake in the middle of. Picture someone coming up for air under the ocean and submerging again. Some are disturbing. Some are entertaining. I kept a dream journal for a time, but for the most part nothing was revealed. There was a lot of wandering around houses. For a time in my thirties I had a recurring dream of driving down a curvy road in a speeding car, unable to open my eyes. In dream logic I could still see the road, but I was out of control. Another one found me unable to put a giant contact lens into my eye. Apparently, my self-conscious was trying to tell me I was short-sighted, blind and veering down a road with no way to gain control, which accurately describes my early thirties.
Sometimes I’ve dreamt in premonitions, seeing something years later I’d told someone I’d dreamt about. When those happen, the words I didn’t understand in the dream make sense now. One dream woke me with a disturbing vision and a headache. I tried to go back to sleep but the headache persisted until I turned on the light and wrote down the dream. I laid down the pen and the headache vanished. It also spurred me to read the Oliver Sachs book to make sure I was all there, as well as turn the dream into a screenplay. I live in Los Angeles; movies, dreams, nearly the same. “All we see or seem is but a dream within a dream,” as Edgar Allen Poe said, another guy who was scared of his own shadow.
I saw a massage therapist once who said he would get messages or psychic feelings from time to time while touching people (once again, I live in Los Angeles). I’m pretty open to the woo-woo and I figured why not? Maybe he’d tell me what to do with my life. He felt my knee and said there was a tap dancer in there or I had been a tap dancer in a former life, which did explain a habit I have of tapping while waiting for things to happen. I was hoping he’d feel my elbow and tell me there was a billionaire wanting to give me stock advice, but no such luck. He was massaging my head and asked, “Drinking was your thing, right?” I told him it had been, but no longer was. “I’d drink too if I had that many people trying to get out of my head.” He said it wasn’t anything threatening or scary, I just have a lot of voices that need to get out.
No one is yelling to take over the world, but sometimes I wonder if those hallucinatory people were just aspects of a personality — impatient, stentorian, submissive, sensual, ego-driven, supercilious, terrified. Or maybe they were just a brain on fire trying to let off steam. Maybe that’s why we write or create: to release those voices. Now I meditate, I sleep well, but I still have raucous dreams. Like anything else with age, I just accept it. Sometimes now they’re even happy, and I’ve woken up laughing a time or two. I’ve felt relatively sane for most of my life, even if my dreaming life might indicate otherwise. I’ve always loved the phrase “touched” for any kind of madness or unexplained thought phenomenon. Lightly touched, perhaps. Fevered. Caressed, but still sane.
Recently, I woke up reading a philosophy textbook in a dream, my brain still trying to learn or parse information even while I was sleeping. I could see the text as I woke up, and part of me was annoyed I was waking myself up in the middle of reading the book, unable to finish it. That was really inconsiderate of me. It wasn’t a book I had read before, not familiar so not a memory. Perhaps there’s a big dream brain trust out there somewhere where we can check out books, then go tap dance, and possibly take over the world without hurting anyone. Or play croquet with a playing card. Or strut and fret our hour upon the stage, chase an imaginary dagger. Or perhaps we just can’t turn our brains off.
