The Shakes
I was crouched on the diving board in a child's pose, head down and facing forwards. The goal was to try and inch my way back to the stairs. All below was only white mist and I couldn't see the water. The board was shaking left, right, up, down, sideways. I figured with my fitness skills it was possible to move back slowly, and some progress was made. It was a matter of grabbing the edges of the board and using my core strength to go back. But the shaking motion of the board was only increasing.
A voice said, "You're going to have to let go and drop. You can't keep on living like this and you know it."
I replied, "But if I drop then I'm going to die. At least if I go backward towards the stairs, there is safety along with the suffering that awaits."
At that moment I woke up. I was trembling, in a cold sweat, and my hands gripping the front of the bed in a child's pose.
This was truly a nightmare and a hallucination combined. It was heavily influenced by three things: the experience in Kampot, reading Louise Mumphord's book 'Sleepless', and the famous scene from the Matrix. The last one is where Neo is instructed to go outside the window and walk the ledge to get out. He ultimately chickens out and goes back inside the room where he is caught.
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At least there was an explanation, but this dream had me reaching for the phone to make contact with a PTSD therapist I had been keeping in touch with in Chiang Mai.
She replied to my message and said, "I can see things are getting more intense. I think you should truly consider coming for the treatment, are you sure you cannot do the 4 weeks? At any rate, let me know when you are ready."
A quick Google search showed that hallucinations were more to do with complex cases of PTSD and indeed more studies had confirmed this was a symptom along with the classic ones I already met: lack of sleep, drinking too much, hard to concentrate for long, easily startled, and so forth. I had to do something about this.
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