fever

I spent 6 or so days with an incredibly high fever recently. Reality was blurred by heat, and a change in perspective from outer world, to inner and closer layers occurred. The bed became my world, and the texture of my sheets and patterns on the ceiling took on strange new importance. Emotions were a luxury, something I remembered having when I was well enough to afford them. Everything shrank and dissolved and...altered.

The presupposition behind the term 'altered' states is that there is a fixed stable state that is somehow the default. But are we not just flux, a moment to moment adjustment in a strange entanglement of humanity? hmm

After many days not knowing when I was awake and when I was asleep, I find myself gradually returning to another more familiar state. But not the same as before. Internal alchemy has occurred that has shifted my perspective on a number of key life issues. Like a b grade sci-fi movie, my consciousness has metamorphosised into something new and strange. A new default perhaps. Or just another moment.

So our body blurs reality, shifts perspective even if the control freak inside us screams in protest. But where does our bag of skin end and our consciousness and soul begin? How much of that illness based reality did I choose to generate on some deep level? Maybe it was the only mechanism I had that would cause me to ask the really hard questions that were lurking in the alleyways of my mind for far too long?

Or then again maybe I just had a bad case of the flu.