Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xa

Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri. © 2005 Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

Tour of a migraine -- $ .50 version

By Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

I spent Sunday in an altered state of consciousness that if it weren't for the steel spike through my head many people would have paid good money to have experienced. Maybe even have paid good money to experience. But as this is a public forum, "I wouldn't know about such things, nope nope nope," is the official story.

There seems to be a point where, after pain becomes merely debilitating, you come out the other side. Out some other side.

I dreamed. I would say "hallucinated", but my eyes were closed most of the time and I wasn't exactly conscious. Hard to draw that line.

At one point I saw a landscape composed of fractally geometric spiky features, neon-bright, ice-blue and ice-translucent. This place had nothing to do with me. I didn't interact with it. But I was there for an incalculable while. The texture and scope (how much field of vision it took up) and color scheme pulsed and modulated, as did the structures I watched. For the most part I felt like I was above it, sometimes felt like I was looking at it through a microscope -- or a telescope. Not a lot of this stuff stuck in my head. I can't describe the soundtrack. Kaleidoscopic is a good word. So is synaesthesia. Unfortunately, hours and hours of adjectives would be a good deal more boring for you than the actual experience was for me.

In a more dream-like sequence, I remember a scene at a place that was important to me as a child -- the church I attended until I was seventeen. Nothing religious was taking place, though, and I didn't really place it as the church parking lot until just now. It was off-scale. Too large. Some carnival was in full swing and the place (and surrounding city) was being wrecked by huge (sky-scraper-sized) vaguely anthropomorphic forms. Many had tentacles for limbs. I remember being more "put out" than really afraid. It agitated me into a near-panic when one swatted too close for comfort, but it bugged me more that everyone else was definitely panicking and no one would help me get to the toy store. This theme continued through several scenes. Until I got a ride to the next scene. I think I drove the old red convertible myself with the faceless owner in the back seat, at least at first....

After that there was some driving through a city-scape on raised highways that seemed to be badly drawn. We were going in circles and I felt like I could steer our car to better-drawn roads if I could call the directions, but I was mostly ignored -- until I pretended not to be rattled entirely when we repeatedly nearly fell through ripped-up sections of pavement -- and then the person at the wheel agreed to follow my directions. I eventually got us off the road entirely by deliberately taking a nasty-looking gap in the highway onto quickly-sketched packed clay and we drove to some field at the back of some beach-front resort....

At one point I was in the toy section of a beach/pool-oriented tourist-trap slightly too large to be considered a convenience store. I was building a weapon to fight the ectoplasmic monstrosities. I remember I had collected some modeling clay and some bubble-blowing liquid soap and some large-ish plastic tubular material (textured with rings of alternately large and small diameters, like a bendy-straw on serious steroids and "bendy" for the whole yellow length) associated with the bubble-gunk. I think I found some magnetic marbles and was sending someone else out for some insulated wire and some old wire coat-hangers for structure. I remember I was vaguely satisfied that I had an idea that would work....

I remember having little patience with queries like, "What the fuck are you up to?" and "What will that do?" and "Are you sure this will work?"

I remember fighting some smaller monster or other in a clearing in the woods, standing on the trunk of the convertible, slinging the doctored tube to launch some soapy, clay-wrapped magnetic marble-thingy through the wire-wrapped tube, the wires on the tube connected to an old car-battery that wouldn't stay connected on a vigorous swing, not to mention that the tube was too soapy to hold onto properly until I found the work gloves in the trunk. But in the end it worked -- wherever a missile hit, an enormous chunk of the creature was messily disrupted, usually taking off a limb. I was a poor shot too, as I recall.

There was more, unrelated to this apparently threaded sequence -- and I can't really guarantee that this was the sequence in which I dreamed the scenes I described.

There was plenty more. I took a shower at one point, and read some of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, loaned to me by orpheusrabbit (I'm into chapter 20 of book 3), but the pain surged again and put me back down. I ate a few crackers and peanut butter and drank water before I hit the futon again. After sleeping until noon on Sunday, I was back horizontal in bed (truth to tell, I never left it except to shower) by 3:00 PM.

At some point my roommate and her boyfriend showed up to commit some olfactory felony in the kitchen (all of my senses get heightened during a migraine -- and I wasn't in good enough condition to drag myself downstairs to complain -- and I sure as hell wasn't going to shout). By the time I was smelling it, I was pretty much screwed. I just rode it out. When they left, they took whatever it was with them -- I could find no sign of it in the kitchen this morning. I know they had come and gone, though. They left other signs. But the smell put me in my own little hell for a while. I finally managed to reengineer the airflow in my room to overpressure it so no air could come in from the hallway or bathroom. Or I guess that was why the AC window unit was on fan-only and vented the way it was. I still have no idea where the floor-fan came from. It doesn't look familiar at all, either from my stuff or from my roommates.... The air-directing geometry was all mine, though. And the fan was pretty old-looking -- second-hand dusty and not exactly current era.

I guess I just pulled the fan out of my pocket. I'm sure there's a retroactive explanation waiting somewhere. I stuck the fan in the linen closet in the bathroom. (Have I seen it in there before? It's starting to feel familiar already...) If I remember, I'll ask the roommate about it. I certainly don't remember getting up to find a fan. And I do remember when my roommate and her boyfriend left again. No living person came into my room....

There was tons more dreaming -- the kind of vivid, disjointed stuff I usually don't get unless I have a fever. Some of it was weirdly sensual -- a kind of all-over bath in glassy icy (but not uncomfortable) pellets, colored in flame-oranges and flame-yellows, flowing quickly over my naked body. I remember the sensation of other presences. I remember partially waking up, but upon determining that the sense of other was fading, consciously re-immersing myself in dream. The presences occurred one or two at a time -- one in contact and one distant when there were two -- and I believe that if I were forced to, I could put names with the presences -- but at this point I would prefer not to.

I gave a message to one of them that I would prefer get returned to me before I make any definitive statements about the presences.

I talked at length with all of the presences, a running narration of something or other (regarding more stuff I don't care to discuss yet) with one or two of them, pleasantries with others, and a message (password?) for one I apparently didn't expect to meet. All of this was at the same time as some of the more positive kaleidoscopic experiences towards the end of the migrainous sequences and before the more ignorable stuff in the wee hours of this morning.

I was wrung out this morning. I'm still in a haze -- as if the storm that generated the migraine has merely wandered off into another part of my head and is still stirring up dust and generating an indescribably subjective analogy to that wet-dust-and-ozone smell of a recently passed -- or immanent -- outbreak. I say indescribable, but if you combine the terms "jittery" and "fuzzy" and "staticky" with "tornado nearby -- but where you can't see it -- maybe already passed but could come back", you start getting close.

I guess it's time to visit my doctor again. I'm all out of the really good stuff I used to keep on hand to fend off the bad ones when I felt them coming on. And they are starting to get more frequent again. It's a sign of stress. Or something.

The time sequences for this entry are all cracked up and shuffled. I guess that's appropriate. Either that or I don't feel like fixing it.

[*]

(Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri, Livejournal, March 19, 2001) © 2005 Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

"I give you full permission to reproduce this post, in part or in full, for the site you have listed. Also, I assure you that this was just a migraine - unmedicated in any way. Just attribute it to the name above, and if you provide html links, link back to this post... Thanks for the link to the site, by the way. I shall enjoy looking it over.

To my mind, the main distinction between dream and hallucination is whether the experiencer participates. Whether any real world background element bleed through is also a factor. The parts where I describe myself doing things were the most dreamlike parts. Anytime when I became aware of being in my room, I largely considered myself to be awake - even though I guess it is always possible that I was only dreming that I was awake.

I don't really recall much in the way of odd body sensations [e.g., when "I felt like I was above it"] other than feelings of heaviness and weightlessness at different times. But this was only while dreaming. For the awake periods, I was dragging myself around the house, but those were more or less normal experiences.

As I recall, some of the emotional tone, particularly what I was feeling during the "presences" part of the experience I detailed, did carry over into the next couple of days. I felt like I had been through some kind of evaluation or review, like an oral examination, and had barely passed. I felt tense and drained at the same time, like I was still waiting for my scores.

This migraine episode [Tour of a migraine -- $ .50 version] stands alone in my experience.

But I do have [recurring] dreams where what I thought was a landscape in the distance seems to be instead a painting or drawing that can rip and tear and give way to a different setting entirely. Those dreams I don't usually associate with migraines, but maybe I haven't been paying close attention. I guess that element of changeable landscape counts as a recurring factor. Sometimes I seem to have some coonscious control over my dreams (as in lucid dreaming), and that is someteimes how I change a dream that is disturbing me into a more pleasant dream. This is not common, though. Maybe I have a dream like this once or twice per year.

I have felt presences before, definitely, as part of migraine aura experiences. In one of the principal episodes of a presence being felt while I was awake, I remember feeling that there was someone, like a person or something with a person's intelligence or awareness, but larger. Like the size of a cow standing up, just outside of my peripheral vision, but always to my left, just beyond the reach of my arm. When I turned to look, the sensation moved with my head, like maybe the presence was attached to my head by an intangible pole. Sometimes it also felt "light" or "heavy", which seems a bit difficult to explain. It was like the presence would push or pull me sometimes. And that was when I decided it was time to lie down before I fell over. I never saw or heard (or smelled) the presence, but I felt that if I could see it, it would be dark and indistinct. The presence, in this episode, did not arrive until the headache had already started. I don't have a good grasp of the amount of time that passed while the sensation of presence persisted -- could have been just a few minutes or maybe as long as half an hour. This time, the sensation of presence went away as the migraine got worse.

Other presences I have felt have been the same as the above, mostly. I can only recall maybe three or four times I sensed a presence aside from the sensation of multiple presences in the dream sequence above. The other occurrences of the sensations were decidedly less strong. They tended also to not have the sensations of heaviness associated with them, and sometimes the presences seemed like they would be light instead of dark. Maybe two of the fainter sensations were of "light" presences, and one of those times the presences drifted from light to dark and back to light again, maybe several times. That was very long ago, and I don't remember too many details from that episode.

I find it difficult to explain the light or dark qualities I associated with the presences. They were never in my field of vision. If you imagine a lamp behind your shoulder, you can imagine that it would brighten the ambience of the room you are in, more so on the side of the room the lamp is on. There really isn't a physical analogy for emanating darkness into a room, but if it were to be possible for an object to suck the light from a room, one would be in the right ballpark.... In any case, I don't really recall any brightening or darkening of things in my field of vision, but perhaps just a feeling perhaps of a light shining on me from behind and to the left or a shadow falling on me from behind and to the left. It's hard to say. It was subtle.

The other times I felt the presences, it was always just at the onset of a migraine, maybe a few minutes before or right when the pain started to get bad. By the time the pain reached the maximum level, I was no loger aware of any presence. I don't recall very completely, but I don't believe any episode with presences lasted longer than half or three quarters of an hour.

I've never been worried that those presences could have been real, because I'm aware of the aura phenomenon and how exotic and random it can be. Thus, I find the occasional feeling of presence ignorable. In this severe case though, there were multiple presences, and I could sense various emotions and attitudes coming from them, and they took on identities that had meaning for me. I still wasn't worried too much that these presences were real in any way, other than that I knew they were being generated out of stuff I had in my head. These personalities contained pieces or fragments of people I knew and had forgotten, or, in at least one case, a person of a sort I expected to one day meet. If I had been more of a religious person, I expect I would speak about these presences in terms of angels or demons or departed souls. This part of the episode was intensely emotional and somewhat uncomfortable, but not completely so.

Not long after I had the migraine/dream disturbance described above, I read an article that had a profound impact on how I thought of these presences. An excerpt is quoted below. Perhaps you can find the whole article in a library?

From New Scientist magazine, 21 Apr 2001, "In search of God"

For several years, Persinger has been using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to induce all sorts of surreal experiences in ordinary people (New Scientist, 19 November 1994, p 29). Through trial and error and a bit of educated guesswork, he's found that a weak magnetic field - 1 microtesla, which is roughly that generated by a computer monitor - rotating anticlockwise in a complex pattern about the temporal lobes will cause four out of five people to feel a spectral presence in the room with them.

On a single occasion, I spent two whole days with only a very, very minor migraine during which, for the whole time, I hallucinated the odor of a really nice clam chowder [see here]. I knew it was associated with the migraine, so I didn't really give it any thought other than to enjoy the smell and regret the lack of actual clam chowder.

Other than the previously described migraine aura episodes, the only other aura situation worth mentioning is one that arrived when I was driving that seemed like a very bright light in my left field of vision that eventually turned into swirling kaleidoscopic patterns with narrow lines of pinks and greens and blues. I was reminded of watching computer-generated cellular automata from my college days. And having read a couple of discussions of what those models model, it only seems fitting.

My migraines in general are very mild. Which is to say, in comparison with those people who lose days or even weeks to their own agony, my migraines usually only last for a couple of hours, maybe half a day, but will go away if I can spend some time (a half hour or an hour) meditating in a dark room. So depictions like the above are extremely rare.

In any case, I got to my destination as soon as I could and prepared for the worst - and it never came. I got the aura with no attendant migraine.

And other than the presences phenomenon, I don't recall any of the elements of this dream recurring.

I am happy to be able to provide you with my experiences and answers to your questions. Migraines are fascinating phenomena. Well. Except for the agony part.

More questions are welcome, if you have any..."

(Emails to Klaus Podoll, August 12-13, 2005; additions in square brackets by Klaus Podoll)

"As for clinical data, I don't mind stating some of that publicly for any duration convenient to you. I was born in 1967. I remember having headaches throughout my childhood, but I don't recall anything of migraine quality until after puberty. I my have been fourteen years old, maybe fifteen.

I was also struck by lightning when I was fourteen - and again when I was fifteen! - and I know that electrocution can have all sorts of unusual deleterious effects. However, I have never had an EEG, a CT, or an MRI to assess any brain damage. No symptoms from migraines were strong enough for me to have sought medical treatment other than the occasional dose of imetrex, and mental performance was good enough for me to graduate high school as valedictorian and to gain entrance to Georgia Tech. I never really considered that there might be any link between electrocution and my migraines until maybe five years ago.

Also, I fell on my head so often as a child that my parents jokingly referred to me as top-heavy.

Anyway, I didn't become aware of any aura-type phenomenon associated with my headaches until I was sixteen, and I think I was seventeen before I had an experience of a feeling of a presence. The above dream episode in 2001 was my last such experience.

As far as I know, of my immediate family only my mother occasionally has severe headaches, but she has never described to me any aura phenomena associated with her headaches. We have discussed the topic before, and I'm sure she would have mentioned phenomena akin to hallucinatory effects had there been any.

Again, feel free to use any of this information as you see fit."

(Email to Klaus Podoll, August 13, 2005)

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