Lucidity Waiver

The past couple days have been very odd for me. I have been slipping into periods of almost complete incoherence lately. While walking home from class this afternoon, I caught myself feeling incredible impulses to do some very unusual and innapropiate things and realized that my mind seemed to be slipping into almost subconscious control. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, but I began to realize that it has been happening with more and more frequency of late, and it is starting to scare me.

The best way that I can think of to describe it is that I am losing conscious control of myself, slipping into subconscious autonomy. It is like blacking out for a few minutes and then coming back, but usually having a vague idea of what just happened. I am losing lucidity. It’s kind of like being in a zombie-state or some sort of fucked up quietism; I am physically active and responsive, but at best, my conscious mind is merely hanging on for the ride.

Yesterday was especially bad. I came home from my 9am class and laid down to take a nap, and it just washed over me like a tsunami and consumed me. I spent the next four hours half-awake in bed or stumbling around my apartment following paranoid and incoherent trains of thought. My head cleared up a little bit in time for me to go to a meeting for the Ad Club’s upcoming presentation, and I was OK for awhile. Right around 8pm, the lunacy started creeping up on me again as I was preparing to write my English 233 paper. I realized at some point that I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything, but rather was just sitting there blankly while my mind zoomed through hypothetical and paradoxical situations, so I just crawled into bed. Around 10 or 11, my mind finally cleared up again and I got up and started writing my paper. I haven’t been sleeping well lately, and so I just chalked it up to lack of sleep.

Today, I was feeling fine until I got out of class. I had a few moments during my walk home where I would just sort of black out, which startled me a little bit, and then between 4pm and 6pm it hit me again while I was watching TV. I lost focus on the tv show and started thinking paranoid thoughts about all sorts of stuff that I needed to do. I can’t remember any specific examples, unfortunately, because it’s just this crazy jumbled mess of half-formed ideas that barely even make sense at the time, much less after it is over.

I still think that it may be related to sleep. I always seem to wake up every few hours (or more frequently at times), so perhaps I am not getting enough REM sleep again. This certainly feels similar to the time when I had paranoid daydream/hallucinations after I didn’t get any REM sleep for almost a week when I had mono induced fevers. I think it is also related to stress, although I’m not sure which is the dominant factor (seeing as stress can affect sleep and sleep can affect stress).

Some notes that I took as I felt myself sliding away this afternoon:

slipping from conscious control to subconscious action. losing lucity. been happening with more frequency. is this what alzheimers is like. want to get scan of my brain. find out what, if anything, is wrong. hard for me, introspective, self aware. makes me paranoid, forces me even more inside myself. more withdrawn, less social. lack of sleep? stress? frightens me. lucidity waivers, lucidity wavers.

That last little bit with the waivers/wavers was apparently my attempt at being witty and using homonyms to describe how it felt like my consciousness was being submissive to my lunacy, waiving its control, as I descended into my madness.

So anyway, in addition to being somewhat busy with school stuff, this is what has been going on with me for the past couple days. So if you have seen or interacted with me lately and I blew you off or I seemed more incoherent than usual, this is probably why. I’m sorry if I managed to upset anyone.