Fiction, Delusions, and Art

So I have come to a point where I can accept that I do have a mental illness.

There are things I wonder about, though. Like, I wonder what it would be like if I just wasn't on any meds. I kind of think it would be easier to ease off some of the meds, and then take the challenges as they come.

Some of the things I experience I think stem from some sort of contact with the spirits. But, my brain gets confused about what is going on, so I receive information and then there are elaborations that aren't true and it spins out of control.

When I am delusional, or at least, when I am having an episode, I am having the time of my life. That's the thing I don't think people understand. My parents say, oh, the worst is behind you, it can only get better from here. They don't understand that having an episode is like the freaking coolest experience of your life.

I sometimes wonder if it is weirder than drugs. Contrary to what other people seem to think, I really haven't done that many drugs in my life. I haven't done any hallucinogens besides one hit of DMT, which didn't really do anything, and cough syrup. Cough syrup was fun, but the difference between being delusional and doing cough syrup is that when you are delusional, you are a bit clearer in a way. Like, you might believe things that aren't true, but you don't feel fucking stupid. You get caught up in these plot lines that are intelligent but lack basis in reality.

And I think that that is the major difference between drugs and delusional episodes. Delusional episodes are all about fiction. I don't know what happens with other hallucinogens, I am curious but I would be scared to actually try something for fear that it would mess me the fuck up. Like, I'm sure I would come down eventually, but it might take way longer to get back to normal than for most people.

But this is what I don't understand. People tell me, why does it matter? Why do you think about your delusions? They are delusions. Not true. Well so is Harry Potter, and Twilight, and Star Wars, and most television shows. I'm not saying my delusions are fictional masterpieces, but my point is, what's wrong with fiction? Fiction is cool. People like fiction.

It's kind of artistic in a way. That's how I look at things now. Like art.

But I'm sitting here down on Earth now, and I can see that the way I think when I am delusional, while not illogical, I believe things when I am delusional, everytime I am delusional, that would never ever be true. Like, I could never ever be the second coming of Christ. No one else would ever believe that, unless I started doing something like performing miracles, which I know would never happen.

I don't even want to be the second coming of Christ. I never did. Why did it keep coming back to that?

Lucid Dreams and Novel Ideas

So I was awake for a period of time last night. I would blame withdrawal from the benzos again but I remember it was like this before I started going off Klonopin. So, after being awake for awhile, I drank some chamomile tea, ate a banana, and moved my pillows to the opposite end of the bed and lied the opposite direction. Eventually, I fell back asleep.

I actually think one of the careers I would find most rewarding would be to be a novelist. Like, a popular novelist like J. K. Rowling or Stephen King who write books that people are obsessed with. To be able to write a story that people found so compelling would be awesome. Except, as I've said before, I can't come up with fiction worth shit while I'm awake. I come up with what I think are compelling story lines in my dreams but never remember them once awake. Except for last night. I don't know if this concept is any good or not, but I was thinking it was in my dream and I remembered a lot of it once I woke up.

So I will just talk about the whole dream. It was lucid. It started out where I was at my parent's house and I wanted to leave. My parents would follow me once I left the house but I could escape them. Running away from my parents in my dreams is an exceptionally common theme for me. Actually being able to escape is not.

I was living with this guy who was maybe in his early forties. He used me for sex but gave me a place to stay and I was okay with this. We were supposed to be having sex, but it wasn't really one of those hormonal type dreams so the sex wasn't real exciting, but the guy was naked. I saw his torso from the front and he was a little bit overweight but not by that much. Then he turned around. Attached to his back was this gigantic fetus. I found this so disturbing that I left this guy right away, despite the fact that I wasn't wearing a lot of clothing. It is common for me to walk around in public in dreams without a lot of clothing.

So my mom was after me again, and I had to escape her. I could do this by shooting straight up in the sky really high, up past layers of clouds, and then landing down somewhere on the ground completely different. I think I might have also been shooting at her with something or hitting her with a stick. I think I stayed with another guy for awhile and then had to leave.

So I shot straight up in the air again, and I was looking down at the city, deciding where to land. I decided to land in the seedy red light district part of town. I could tell it was the red light district because of all the red light radiating out from it. When I made this decision, I knew that it was probably a poor decision because I was likely in for more than I had bargained for. Cities in my dreams, real big dirty cities with crime and stuff, when they appear in my dreams, there is a strong feeling of evil associated with them, like this is where evil and the dark side of humanity dwells. And I had a sense that coming from a wealthy suburban family who loved me, I was sheltered from this side of humanity and perhaps not prepared to deal with it. But I made the decision to land there and did anyway.

The next thing you know I was woken up by policemen. I had apparently been unconscious. I had been knocked unconscious by a gang of men who had sexually assaulted me. But they had done more than just that. They had implanted a chip in me which recorded my sexual memories/sexual experiences and broadcasted them to the gang of guys somehow. Because I was some sort of prostitute or something, and I they knew I was going to have a lot of fucked up sexual experiences, and it brought them some sort of sick pleasure to see them, to be able to experience them themselves in vivid detail. Or maybe it was for them to make money somehow.

There was some sort of government operation going on regarding this and related incidents. I was placed with a group of people who had had similar experiences happen to them. But the government had to be careful what they told me because they didn't know what information the chip would broadcast to the gang of men. So I was in this elevator type thing with a bunch of other people and if I remember correctly they were mostly men, strangely enough. I don't watch a lot of comic book type movies but there was a sense of it being similar to this one movie which I don't remember what it was called where there were a group of superhuman beings with special powers. Anyway, I was informed that because of my incident, I had been given the name Thorazine. In real life, Thorazine is the name of an antipsychotic. However, it is not in the same class of drugs as the other antipsychotics I have mentioned on my blog. Those are Atypical Antipsychotics, so I guess Thorazine would be considered a typical antipsychotic. I'm not sure that's what they are called, but they are an older class of drugs. Thorazine is famous for making people do what's known as the Thorazine shuffle, where they walk like they are drugged because apparently Thorazine drugs you pretty bad. I have never taken Thorazine myself, unless that is what they gave me the night I drank too much seven years ago and was taken to the ER. They injected me with something to calm me down and later my mom told me it was some sort of antipsychotic. My friend who has taken Thorazine said that unlike the atypical antipsychotics Thorazine makes you feel good, and after I was injected with this drug at the ER I felt pretty good and nice and relaxed. Anyway, the people gave me a reason why I was named Thorazine but I don't know that it made any sense. There was a guy there name something like Lepitor. It was a name similar to Lipitor but it wasn't Lipitor. We had some sort of romantic thing going on. As this dream was progressing I was trying to commit to memory everything that was going on and I knew I wouldn't be able to. There was something going on with the elevator like it was falling or something, and I heard the sound of water really loud and I asked what that was but then I woke up because I was trying so hard to collect all this data without waking up that I woke myself up too much. That's the trouble with lucid dreams, I get so excited I wake myself up sometimes.

So anyway, that was pretty much it. It was supposed to be part of a novel in the genre of erotic sci fi or something. It was almost like the dream was purposely trying to give me an idea for writing a novel because right after the part where the police told me about the chip it was kind of like, "Remember this! This is an idea for a novel!" But I'm not really sure about this.

Striking Gold Without Picking Your Nose

So my mom tells me I should write fiction. She tells me my blog is just so great, and that when I was taken to the hospital for the first time, the guy who interviewed me about what I believed told her that I should be a fiction writer, because he was impressed by what I told him, despite the fact that it wasn't true.

I didn't know that the guy said this, my mom just told me this yesterday. But it made me very glad that other people appreciated the greatness of my delusions, and it was funny to think he said this even though at that time I hadn't even figured everything out yet so there were massive holes in the story.

The thing is, the time when I became delusional was the time I struck gold. I came up with an awesome story, although it is not without plot holes, I don't think any of them are massive enough that they couldn't be smoothed over and the story couldn't be made into a movie. But I was in quite a bit of a different state when I came up with this, I was the most fucked up on life at that point and I wasn't even on anything (unusual). I kind of think it wasn't even me who came up with this story, I was just somehow tapping into a higher source. All the loose ends tie together in the end, like they do in any good story. That's what fiction is about: coming up with a bunch of events that follow a pattern and create a bunch of loose ends that tie together in the end, in a way that leaves you with a feeling of victory and has some sort of lesson about life. My delusions have all that.

Most of the time, I'm not that great at writing fiction. Coming up with stories isn't my creative strength. My creative strength comes out when I program computer games, and I come up with ways to model real life phenomena amongst a colony of virtual bugs. It's freaking awesome. But when it comes to fictional stories, I'm not good at coming up with stuff that's original and not stupid.

So two years ago I was writing a fictional story based on my delusions, like how it could have been if my delusions were true. I decided it made the story stronger if the main character (who wasn't me) told stupid lies all the time. Don't ask. So I would have him say something strange, and I was cracking myself up with the stuff I came up with. Then afterwards, every time, the person whom he was talking to would say, "interesting." Every time. It was a little thing I had going.

But I got frustrated. I had a lot of dialogue, but in every scene it was people talking about their majors (because it took place in college). Sure college students talk about their majors, but they talk about other things too. What do I have them talk about? I don't know! Guys by themselves. What do guys by themselves talk about when there aren't any girls around? How am I supposed to know? Yet I am somehow supposed to make the dialogue sound realistic and true to life. In order to be any good at this, I would have to spend a great deal of time observing people and their dialogue in the real world.

As I'm sitting here thinking, I'm remembering a time when I was a freshman in high school and I wrote a story about a teenage girl going on a camping trip with her family that people liked. The thing that people liked about it was the voice of the girl, not the plot, the plot kind of sucked. For people who don't know voice in writing refers to when something is told from a certain person's perspective, the sense of personality of the person you get based on the way they talk and the stuff they say.

So anyway, maybe I should focus on middle grade fiction for girls.