Saturday, February 22, 2014

Alternate realities of delusion

The inside of my head has been a very noisy place the last few days. I don't know if I have the cold or flu, but it hardly matters. My chest aches, breathing is fraught with peril, and I've had a mild headache for several days now, off and on. More on than off. I've been really tired, yet not sleeping well. Why not?

Well, part of the problem is the movie playing in my head. Movies. Many many movies. Most of us think of ourselves as a unitary person. One entity that makes the decisions and carries out the various actions. One entity that talks to other people. One entity that is "us".

Some people don't have that experience. For whatever reason they have a condition or conditions that lead to multiple "selves". It's certainly a staple of fiction. For a while I was interested in this, but I haven't looked at the current state of research in many years.

What I have looked at is all the stuff going on in the background of my head. There are several broad streams of, of, stuff, I guess is the best way to put it. One stream is revisions to my novel universe, which gets into some very strange places in the far corners. Nobody has seen that yet. Another stream is visualizing flows of data from the several databases I work with. Another one is various fitness activities and (much more to the point) POTENTIAL activities. Plus add in all sorts of superhero fantasies made alive, along the lines of - so how would someone with this particular superpower actually act and react in real life? Add in some concern about the terrible things that Stephen Harper is doing to Canada, and what could or should be done about it.

All these things are mixing and melding together in various ways at various times. It's like several movie projectors flashing different images all at once up onto the wall of my semi-conscious mind, with content of the reels changing constantly, the projector bulbs brightening and dimming, or the projectors themselves starting and stopping. I'm certainly not in control. Right now I can't seem to focus in on any of them, so I drift along, listening to the babble, watching the show in my head. Trying to sleep.

It's very entertaining sometimes. I'm currently writing out a new scene to start the book, to show readers Hardisty's bike crash, rather than talking about an event of several years ago. Now, in my head, Ronnie (who is a take charge kind of girl) overhears on the police radio that they've found the guy that caused the crash. She successfully assaults a cop to get into the police car, and zooms off to do God knows what to the guy.  Lights and sirens going. Keep in mind that during this scene she is covered in blood from trying to hold Hardisty's leg together till the ambulance came. I think that qualifies as adding a bit of action to a scene.

One of the ever-present scenes in my head is the one where the aliens come to earth. Cats have been their spies. Several species we share this world with are sentient, and they testify against us. It turns out that worlds with life on them are rare and precious. We've been messing up our world, and they take charge. One thing they do is end commercial fishing and all whaling.  There is a scene in my head of the alien ships plucking whaling ships out of the ocean, and dropping them on the office buildings owned by the corporations involved. Transporting dangerous goods is still permitted, but any spills are brought to the attention of management and shareholders, in lets just say a forcible way. Some of them don't survive. Human life is cheap to the aliens; there are so many of us, and so many are wastes of skin.

In one of them I was a race director. Several databases were lined up, sending out various entities to duke it out to decide which database had better data. The entities marched out in neat rows, sort of like a marching band, competing to get my attention. Meanwhile, I'm looking at the wounded and malnourished entities, trying to get them fixed up so they can participate properly. Sometimes it's hopeless and I have to put them out of my misery.

Some of you may remember from a post many years ago I discussed ways of making various sporting events more entertaining. Golf. Triathlon. Baseball. There's other things there that might interest you. Polar bears, even. I was thinking for marathon all the competitors get an accurate GPS chip that tracks their distance, but they don't get a readout. They all start off in a big block like now, but have to make their own way cross country in rough terrain well stocked with hungry creatures, with no course marked. No aid stations, no weapons. If they come back and haven't completed the required distance, they get disqualified.

There are many more flitting through my mind. Meanwhile my chest and back are very sore. There is supposed to be a 16 K run this weekend, but that's not going to happen. At this point I'm not even sure if work will happen on Monday.

That NyQuil is great stuff.


  1. Superhero fantasies :) Feel better soon. Have you been drinking a lot of coffee?

  2. Very little coffee since last Monday. Mostly it's been honey lemon tea to sooth my throat.


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