I’ve never had hallucinations before when I was sick.

Some invisible form was holding my knees, my feet, pulling them, dragging me slowly by my legs downwards. It was so real. And I knew that the more I let myself float into these imaginings the more real and physical they would become, the more inescapable. Just like a drug trip.

I would struggle to try and wake myself. It’s important, terribly important, I would tell myself in my head in my half-awake blurred darkness. If you don’t try and wake and remember the real life where you are now, you are going to drown in this, and he will have you. He will pull you down. This is going to get scarier and he will get more real, and there will be real damage. This is all in your head, but your entire life has all been in your head, right? So don’t underestimate how real something in your head can be. Don’t give in, wake up.

And I would jolt awake every time, dizzy from the pain of immediate transfer into reality, having to take it all in again. My room, the time of the day, sounds of repairmen in the bathroom fixing the heater. All over again. Why did I have to take in the same reality so many times to know it was real? It was all so tiring that sometimes I wondered if it was worth it to not just go with the hallucinations.

Who is he? I blearily scanned my room. Daylight lay only faint fingers through the closed blinds on the soft, hazy darkness. There was no one. I was so scared in my head. I couldn’t decide if I wouldn’t be less scared if I actually saw someone to explain the touching and the pulling.

Then I would lie and breathe deeply, half-panting, and start to drowse again back into his gently but steadily pulling arms.

Later I would sit the electronic keyboard in a state medically known as wide awake, feeling weak but fine otherwise, and forget the notes I play every day. I could only tell that it didn’t sound the way it sounds every day. I would look at my fingers on the keys, pressing down where I had trusted muscle memory to so naturally lead them, and hear the plain wrongness of the notes, and draw a complete blank on what I was doing wrong. And then, as I sat poring over my fingers as though my unaccepting, disbelieving stare will heal them of their malady, I would be so scared again inside my head as I felt the inklings of something happening within me that I have never known before.