Using My Brain
Day 55 of Writing
I wrote earlier about the challenges of creating dramatic tension with characters that technically can’t be killed. One of the elements that I had thought of early on was making their brains very fragile, prone to many types of failure. My main characters are, essentially, technological constructs, and things can always go wrong.
It is very personal, in my case. Write what you know, they say, and one thing I do know is brains not doing what they are supposed to. I have briefly mentioned my neurological condition and how it effects me, but those were only hints. In fact, it causes a wide array of neurological dysfunctions that come and go. I have experienced things I have only read about and things I never even heard of. It is often strange, annoying, uncomfortable and not infrequently disabling. Before one of the drugs I am on now was finally approved by the FDA, I could barely function.
My symptoms can come and go without warning. I wanted to afflict my characters with that same challenge. I based their problems not just on my own experiences, though. I am a huge fan of highly esteemed neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, and have read almost everything he has written, most especially his works on neurology. His The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is still my favorite. He describes various neurological conditions in a way that makes them very personal and understandable. He focuses on the people that have to deal with them as much as on the problems themselves. In case he is still unfamiliar, his book Awakenings was the inspiration for the Robin Williams film of the same name. Sadly, we have since lost both of them.
The things my characters are subjected to, as strange as they might seem, are all based on actual neurological conditions. Did you see the terrifying episode of Dr. Who where the statues only move while you blink? There is a real condition that creates that type of experience. It is called cerebral akinetopsia. It is an inability to perceive motion. I incorporate that and a lot of other real and bizarre conditions, a few that I have experienced myself. There is a very fun sequence where a character can only move when they sing, and yes, that is a real thing. When the brain goes haywire, things can get very strange.
I have experienced auditory hallucinations. They are very strange, and science still does not completely understand them. In my case, certain sounds trigger voices all talking at the same time, and I can’t make out what the people are saying. It sounds very real, even though I know at the time it is not. There are lots of different types of auditory hallucinations, from hearing music to hearing voices telling you to kill yourself or kill someone else. Fortunately, I don’t experience the later.
My hallucinatory experiences have all been mild and benign. The olfactory hallucinations are always of a very strong unpleasant odor that follows me wherever I go. The visual hallucinations are infrequent and quite interesting. It is possible that they are hypnagogic hallucinations, those that occur in the conscious state between waking and sleeping. They only occur at night when I am in bed. It feels like I am awake.
This was the only symptom that I sort of liked. They were actually quite beautiful. The patterns of light and shadow on the wall at night were made by the street lights filtered through the leaves. They transformed into complex and detailed scenes on the wall of paper cutouts of people. They looked just like the art of silhouettes, where profiles and even complex scenes like mine were cut out of paper. It is a skill still associated with magicians, and famed close-up artist Dai Vernon made much of his early living at it. There was an amazing permanence to these silhouette scenes, as I could look away for a few minutes and look back and still see the same scenes. As real as they looked, I never for a second thought that they were real. I sometimes spent several minutes marveling at them. The next night would present a series of brand new scenes. I always knew they were a hallucination, and in a way they were lovely and comforting.
They went away for months, and then came back, but now they were more menacing. This was after Halloween, so that may be why the silhouettes were replaced with detailed skulls. The skull was the first hallucination that moved, and it moved towards me. I was very startled. After that, I stopped looking at the patterns on the walls or out the window at night, where the leaf patterns could resolve themselves into faces.
If you are curious about my condition, it is covered in more detail in my book The Greatest Adventure, which focuses on our early years in show business.
What’s Up with Us
Happy Birthday to me. That is about as much celebrating as I am going to do today. We are putting any birthday celebration off until things are back to a little more normal. It will be a new normal, though. Sadly, I am beginning to fear that just might be by my birthday next year.
I love my home State of California, and have never been happier to be a resident here. We have the largest economy in the U.S. If California were a country, we would have the fifth largest economy in the world. Governor Newsom is using our economic power to work directly with industry to secure 200 million medical-grade masks per month. We will even have enough to share with States having high need. Newsom stated he has basically given up on Federal assistance. The States are on their own as the Federal government continues to flail impotently.
I had my first covid dream. Belle and I always gear up before we go anywhere, with a kit with all our protective gear and another that has everything we need if we decide to take a drive somewhere and eat in the car. It might have once been called a picnic basket but it is now just part of our covid battling supplies. Sometimes you just need a change of scenery.
In the dream I went out in the world without our kit or even a mask and acted as I used to before all of this. I shook people’s hands, and then realized that was a mistake and slapped my hand to my forehead when I realized it. Then I realized I’d need to rub sanitizer on my face and hands, but we were out. [We actually are running low.] There was no place to wash up, as all the restrooms were locked. [That is a real thing here as they don’t want non-employees contaminating their rest room or people just coming in to use it.] It was a nightmare. I much prefer my more usual adventure and science fiction based dreams.
Belle still has her job. Being able to work, contribute to something important at Cedars Sinai, and get a regular paycheck helps a lot. She has started rehearsing again, and is gearing up for doing a number of videos. I am also starting to get more creative work done after nearly two weeks of just feeling completely drained.