P is for Palinopsia

A man and a woman are sent to infiltrate the special training school. They are chosen because they look convincingly like a couple. The school is far off the main road, on undeveloped land. They bring a sleeping bag and warm camping clothes, and camp together nearby the night before. In the morning, they find the school -- a big multistory warehouse of a building with nothing to identify it -- and walk through it, visiting all the floors. One floor has giant chimeric animals that don't look like anything they've seen before. Another has what look like interactive exhibits of art and design, except that when the woman tries to interact with the exhibits she receives varying degrees of electric shock or unexpected injections of neurotransmitters. The man and the woman talk to several students, who seem human but look slightly off (faces oddly blurred and swollen, with distorted features); the students all deny the existence of the school even though they and the man and woman are inside; the students are all extremely polite and dressed in school uniforms. Finally the man and woman decide that they have gathered as much information as they can and that it is time to leave. They are alert to the possibility of attack when they get into the school yard, but nothing happens until they approach their truck, which is parked in a narrow entryway. Then, suddenly, several students surround them. The man, captured and hurt, calls to the woman to run, but as she does she turns to look back at him and everything goes dark.

When she wakes up, she is in some kind of nourishment hide -- a simple wooden 3-sided, roofed structure that provides transdermal nutrients to whomever sits inside. She has a feeling of relaxed well-being and satiety. The floor of the hide is lined with clean fresh straw, and the day is sunny and warm. She looks out of the open side of the hide, and sees the human-looking students walking in small groups. It's a sunny day, possibly not the same day on which she was captured. She gets up and follows the students through the packed earth streets until she realizes they're heading back toward the school. As they approach the undeveloped fields, she can see the chimeric animals in the distance, and feels afraid to see them untethered. She asks a student why they are there, and the student says "for practice".

It becomes clear that the school is a training school for special combat forces. The students are conscripts who have been caught as she and the man were and given varieties of treatments to make them more compliant. During the week, they learn the tradecraft of becoming assassins, and on the weekends they supposedly have "furlough time" to enjoy the street fair in the local town. However, what actually happens is that the weekends are the chimeras' time for tradecraft, and the students are their targets. Managing to make it back to the school on time for the evening roll call on Sunday assures you a place for the following week; being late means that you're trapped between the outer perimeter of the undeveloped fields and the inner perimeter of the school doors, with all the animals that were on exhibit inside the school. It's a free-for-all, and the goal is to survive until the next weekend. The woman realizes immediately that she will need to try, not to return to the school, but to escape the training grounds, but she has no weapons or food.

I woke up from this dream last night, feeling not right somehow. My mind felt heavy, and I had trouble coming fully awake or figuring out how to sit up. When I finally did, my brain’s image refresh rate went crazy. When I moved my hand in front of my face, instead of my brain compensating for the movement and showing me one hand that fluidly moved across my field of vision, I saw hundreds of hands all fractionally overlapping each other -- just like what happens on your computer screen when the processing speed slows way down before a crash. The same thing happened with stationary objects as I moved through the room. There was no distortion of color or shape -- I saw things as they were, just in overlapping multiple images. What I mean to say is, I didn't see anything that wasn't there.

It was not fun navigating to the bathroom, and it lasted until I fell asleep again, which took about an hour. Apparently I managed to walk over to my computer and write down my dream, because when I woke up later, there was the computer file with a time stamp of 05:16:01.

This episode seemed to be related to the fact that I started taking Nystatin yesterday for a thrush infection. I didn't have problems when I took the daytime doses, only after the evening one, so I suspected a drug interaction with my night-time meds. I never had a reaction like this with my night-time meds before adding Nystatin. It didn’t recur again today when I took the morning dose, although I still feel logy from last night. I called the pharmacist and gave him a list of all the meds I take at bedtime, and he looked them up for me and said there are no known interactions with Nystatin. Dr. L isn’t in the office on Friday, so I couldn’t call and ask her. I left messages for my therapist and internist to see if they had any suggestions.

My therapist speculated that it might be a combination of the Malarone and the Nystatin, made worse at night because of the change in neurotransmitter processing during sleep. We had talked about the possibility of Malarone hallucinations before -- I guess some people get them, but I never did until now. She reassured me that, if it’s a Malarone side effect, it’s not dangerous or damaging -- just potentially frightening if one is not forewarned. Now I am, so hopefully if it happens again it won’t be so freaky. It's funny how much of a difference there can be between reading about an experience and having it oneself.

I read through the side effects listed for Malarone on the drugs.com website again tonight. They include the following CNS side effects: headache, anorexia, dizziness, abnormal dreams, insomnia (5% or more); psychotic events (eg, hallucinations), and seizures. I think it's safe to say I'm having abnormal dreams, and I have been having problems with my appetite as well. My insomnia got worse when I increased my Malarone dose; since then I have been cutting my sleeping pill in half so I can take the second half when I wake up in the middle of the night, since I can no longer get back to sleep on my own.

One question that keeps nagging at me is how the Nystatin could be interacting with the Malarone (or any of my other meds, for that matter) when it's supposedly not absorbed from the GI tract. I guess the answer could be that, at least in my case, it is. But how? Interactions within the GI tract itself that propagate elsewhere in the body? Leaky gut? Compromised blood brain barrier?

Sometimes I just wish I could understand better. It's easier for me to accept that way.