NOW YOU SEE IT

NOW YOU DON'T

When I opened my eyes at the end of this afternoon's nap, I saw a costumed clown drive his motorcycle into my bedroom closet. A few seconds later, two wimpled nuns sat at the end of my bed and worked on their makeup, while a bright red ragamuffin doll jumped up and down on my printer. Well, welcome to my hallucinations! I have been hallucinating for several years now, a side effect of the ten medications I have been taking for my heart and stomach. I discontinued clonidine because the ghostly creatures would hang around for hours when I was on that drug, whereas they generally fade away in a few seconds. Unlike the world of my night-dreams, which is a place of constant horror, ugliness, brutality, anguish, emotional torture and madness, with the people of my real life constantly being changed into savage monsters, the realm of my hallucinations is inhabited by creatures whose general aspects are serene, pleasant, vividly colorful, cheerful, harmonious, and warmly inviting, even though there is never any indication that they are "aware" of my existence, even when I wave at them or beckon them to join me. Bear in mind that these are not day-dream images, or fignewtons of the imagination, which can be manipulated and erased--they are affected by nothing but their own ephemerality. They can dissolve into one another, but they determine their own duration--not even closing one's eyes will make them disappear: they are not a visual thing in any optical sense of the word. Given that my psychic world is peopled most often by the grotesque screaming demons of my bipolar depressions, and the tormenting savagery of my night-dreams (which exhaust and taunt me for hours after they end, having left my bedding in a wild serpentine tangle), I regard my hallucinations as almost friends, even though the intriguingly half-clothed ladies always ignore me. If they are harbingers of my eventual madness, this battered and weary spirit is destined to slide into a long-awaited serene sweetness. So be it. Oh, there's a squirrel nibbling on my computer cords ...