I’ve been ill this past week or so, but am feeling better now. It was one of those bugs that alter reality, high temperatures and blocked head putting me in a strange, dream-like state where I wasn’t sure, at times, what was real and what was not.

My dreams were strange as well, lucid then spinning away like a kaleidoscope of images, as I travelled landscapes familiar and bizarre, the line between sleep and waking somehow blurred as the illness took hold. Kaleidoscope, I recently discovered, is apparently the collective term for a group of butterflies, and that’s how the dreams felt, blots of colour flying about, at once near yet untouchable, all around me.

I wrote some stuff, nonetheless. A little challenge for Sacha, some blog posts, even managed to do a little editing (once I’d completed my list :-D). I also had to keep on with most things I usually do, fortunate in that I work from home and so could take a break when needed.

But the interesting thing, the lingering effect, is a sort of loosening of words onto the page. As though whatever burned its way through my system last week changed the way I thought and saw things, and how I expressed them.

I remember reading Aldous Huxley’s Doors Of Perception years ago, about his controlled experiments with peyote in the 50’s, and the way it changed how he saw the world. While I’m certainly not advocating drug use, I wonder if I’ve just taken my own sort of fever-fueled trip through my subconscious, awakening ideas I might not otherwise have accessed.

Or maybe I’m still unwell and this is the last of my fever delusion…