I woke up sick yesterday morning and stayed home from work, which is very rare for me. I think I caught the same bug Rebecca and Lanee had last weekend, which had them worshipping at the porcelain throne for a day and a half. I have a heartier constitution and it didn't hit me quite so hard, but there was plenty of gurgling and churgling inside of me and I was pretty wiped out for about 24 hours.
Mostly I slept. In fact, no matter what activity I engaged in, I would fall asleep. I'd start to read, and fall asleep. Put on my iPod, fall asleep. Watch a movie, asleep. For a guy who rarely sleeps more than six hours a night, this amounts to a surreal experience.
I remember getting sick as a kid, and falling in and out of a dream-like stupor. Then my sleep-sickness would have a theme, almost like a hallucinatory experience. I remember one in particular that took place on a harbor, at night, with ships passing and foghorns blasting. After two days of sweating in bed I could almost feel the sea-air, and struggled to distinguish reality from my visions of darkness.
I didn't have a theme this time, although I did find myself frequently repeating lines from David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust album, which probably reveals something about my psyche, although I shall not attempt an interpretation.
Sickness is the body's effort to cleanse itself, and our natural desires to sleep and drink liquids and not eat are all part of the healing and cleansing process. And I suppose the dreams and hallucinations are the brain's reaction to toxins moving through the system. But I prefer to think of them like the medicine man, inducing a dream-like stupor with herbs and heat and wood-smoke, to have a vision of the world from the inside out, even if it is only to see Ziggy Stardust.
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