Hallucinations

Yesterday, I had two conversations with two different people about botched surgeries and badly healed bones. So obviously, I woke up this morning thinking about surgeries. My surgeries. I've had ten of them in my 62 years. 

I hate going under anesthesia. I hallucinate. I hallucinate universes. If it's a good trip, I wake up feeling WOW!! Everything is wondrous, I have seen the secrets of the multiverses, everything is mindbogglingly clear to me, but I don't know or remember exactly what it is. If it is a bad trip, I wake up despondent; despaired; all hope is abandoned.

When my sister had her C-section, I asked her if she had hallucinations. Yes! she said. She went shopping in London!

Mine are about universes opening up, or shutting down. I think a lost safety pin was involved in one--it led to layers and layers and layers and infinite layers of a line of possibility deleted. In another, a dog named Biscuit on a dark tunneled rail track caused a universe to collapse. I also remember one in which I was version seven of myself and I caught a fleeting glimpse of earlier and later selves--or maybe it was parallel selves? One time, I was on the ceiling looking down as a white-clad cohort that included my neurosurgeon operated on my spine. They were talking, laughing, and listening to some happy music. I know the music was happy but I didn't remember the tune when I woke up. Overactive imagination? Too much sci-fi?

I've found out that memories of hallucinations are not very reliable. It's the feelings that stick--the "Oh, WOW!!!" or total desolation--and result in many subsequent weeks of positivity or emptiness, purpose or ennui.

The mother of all hallucinations occurred one night around six weeks after that spine operation. Was it a hallucination? How could it be? I was basically recovered and off all medication. Our bed was then next to a bank of windows. It was late April and the windows were all open to let the breeze in. I was awake-asleep. You know, that time when you're aware but inert? I felt a physical pull: like an immensely powerful magnet was reeling me in, arching my body toward the skies and I could not stop it. Part of me didn't want to stop it. Scared-thrilled. Afraid-yearning. My husband was snoring next to me. I couldn't tell him. I was levitating, resisting, being reeled anyway. It took all my effort to stretch my hand down and actually tether myself to Sanjib's forearm. I held on for dear life. Then I fell back down into bed.

That's all. This happened in April 2001. However, with this one, there is no memory loss. I remember every detail clearly. I feel every feeling. I see, I taste, I hear, I smell. It felt real. 

What was this experience?

As I write this one, I imagine how it will read.

I suddenly feel like one of those people who report being kidnapped by aliens: those people I laugh at, the UFO kidnap victims (or should I be more politically correct and say, survivors?)

And then, I say, like them, I can't explain it but it was real.