That stoned feeling - II

Felt like getting stoned

When the decision was made to switch my pills in May 2010 after 8 months of the irregular bowel movements and unexplained diarrhoea, I was promised a better quality of life along with the reduction of pills from 3 to one combination pill.

However, I was advised that I would have the side effects of getting stoned along with vivid dreams with the prospect of insomnia. Living in Amsterdam, everyone would have thought I knew what getting stoned was. For all the troubled adolescence I had that exasperated my parents, I never took to drinks or drugs, I got religion instead and with that stopped smoking at 18 having smoked for 4 years.

Now, I had taken a puff or two of a spliff and indeed inhaled, whatever effect it was supposed to have I never arrived there. My on-off partner who had come to stay with me for the first few months after I left hospital was in every way a stoner, he bought ready-rolled spliffs and smoked the living room to a cloud, playing with himself before going to bed in the main bedroom.

Google, how do you feel stoned?

Like I did years before when I had a sherry, a port and a glass of wine before getting sick into the sink later that night, I had to go online to understand what being drunk was, what a hangover was, now, what the feeling of being stoned was. I thought, having an idea of what it was would help me through the experience. Read it in the blog below.

Blog - That stoned feeling

It was a light-headed feeling almost like I was being starved of blood to my head, you feel faint though nowhere near fainting. It informed the reason why I took my pills late, close to bedtime, so the stoned feeling cleaved unnoticeably into my sleep. There are times I have been up and about when that stoned feeling begins, usually around 90 minutes after taking the pills.

I have over time been able to work through it without the need to settle down somewhere to recover. It can take up to 2 hours for it to clear up. If you were not that observant, you won’t even notice I was slightly impeded by the stoned feeling, my wits very much with me.

That stoned feeling was stronger last night

Strangely, last night, whilst I was writing my last blog, I felt the stoned feeling in a more accentuated way than usual, I could not explain why. I pressed on with completing my blog and was quite wide-awake into the early hours before I got some needed sleep. I cannot remember having any vivid dreams, I just wonder if there is a switch somewhere that got flicked. We’ll see what this night brings without getting too anxious about it.

There was an attempt to switch my pills in late 2018 which failed woefully, every possible side effect of inconvenience and negatively impacting my quality of life materialised. I presented an over 40-page diary of my experience to make the case for being returned to my previous regimen than having me being put on another guinea pig enterprise. We switched to a generic version in October, they seem to be just okay.

Some might seek the exhilaration of being stoned, even with experience, I cannot convince myself I like the feeling, one bit.

Thought Picnic: Night cooking to self-exorcism

A person of the night

Being more of a nocturnal person, stranger things have happened in the night than should be the case in the lives of many others.

In fact, I have the inkling that if people had dreamt these things and shared those dreams with people of a certain persuasion and not a few, an exorcism would be ordered; based on contrived and tenuous links with some ethereal interactions with the spirit and God help them help themselves.

My nights start early and are somewhat regimented around the 11^th hour, the hour of pills; it behoves me to have abstained from foods two hours either side of taking my pills else I end up with a rather stoned feeling through the night.

Slight thrills of night pills

I have a physiology that can never like drugs, the eerie feeling, the light-headedness and that state of suspended animation of being between consciousness and the subconscious pushing my mind into a dreamy phase of lacking control over my imagination that takes flight to places angels fear to tread; it is a world I dread.

Taking food in that 4-hour window especially those that have the taste-enhancing ingredient of fat take me to that dreadful land and it has meant that the pill-time switch to the witching hour if I have succumbed to hunger pangs and ingested something later than 9:00 PM – I apparently do not have a set time for meals and that creates a bit of chaos in itself.

Ingestion is the easy part, incubation is worse, the incubation of thoughts, thoughts of what I would like to have for a meal and what it takes to make it.

A night of long beans

The other day it was moin-moin (bean pudding cakes – recipe provided courtesy of Adefunke’s defunct blog), I had to soak a bag of split black eyed beans in water for hours, the optimum being 8, I think they were soaked for close to 11.

The dried fish came out of the freezer and that was soaked in hot water, bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, boiled eggs, palm oil and species all came together in the journey to satisfy a yearning.

After blending in the peppers, tomatoes and onions into the beans, the other condiments were stirred into the mix and the first part poured into a baking dish, covered with foil and left to bake for an hour.

Then I found three small ramekins and poured the rest of the mix into them, placed the ramekins in a steaming pot and steamed the mix for about an hour.

After which I had the opportunity to savour my moin-moin in large cubic portions cut out of the baking dish or from one of the ramekins.

Stewing in the night

Then again, as I rummaged through the freezer, I found some frozen cooked meats and put the bag in the fridge for defrosting, it was well after 1:00AM when I put chopped tomatoes, peppers, onions and stock cubes in the blender – I was about to make some stew.

In 90 minutes, it was all ready and I was just having the stew as if I was having soup, satisfying a craving for tastes and food that just overwhelm you at unusual times of the day.

For those who know, imagine if you told your African-initiated church priest that you dreamt of cooking and eating at night or in my somnambulist wake doing the same – it would be Psalm 119; read 119 times into a cup of water that you have to throw away thrice – talk about hard-labour self-exorcism.

[Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible with 176 verses.]

That stoned feeling

Tired enough to feel nothing

The news pills had their debut on Friday night. We had a late working day; in fact, I had to leave before all was finished because I was beginning to wilt – it was difficult to think straight.

That was just about 21:30 hours and as I got home I was so exhausted and almost out of it, so at 22:30 hours after affirming to myself that the pills will do me good, work as prescribed for my well-being and that I suffer no ulterior side-effects I popped the 1^st pill and went to bed.

Well, not bed per se, I was at my computer operating machinery – my keyboard – for another 90 minutes before I finally made that 30-centimetre journey to my bed to seek sleep.

I had been informed I would have the feeling of being stoned; I cannot say I felt anything too different apart from some thoughts that appeared to be going out of line which were drawn back into focus but it was a bit of a roller-coaster ride.

Thoughts management

Each thought had to be assessed on the logic of its existence, why I was having the thought and if it was relevant to what situation I was in then – if not, discard and process the next thinking – in one or two cases there were exaggerations of claustrophobia or lines both of which had to be tempered with a sense of proportion – I am not hemmed in and no, a door does not have to be that high.

I slept well and woke up feeling fine, my neighbours were informed of the night and there was the plan to take in some sun but before I made the outing I was back in bed sleeping – it was not till late afternoon that I found myself able to go shopping at the Absolutely British shop in Amstelveen, I agonised about the right metro stop having forgotten my phone but convinced myself eventually that I would get off at the right place, but on returning home, it was bedtime again.

In the meantime, I had already done some productive work on my computer, building a few virtual machines for a number of experiments – I do wonder when I got that done during the sleepless times.

No sureties for sureness

My second night was a bit different, I might have really felt stoned, there was a feeling of delirium and sense of not being in complete control and for me that meant you stayed in bed not walked around the house.

Did I just hear someone ring my bell? Well, at that time, maybe not – but that has happened before, that is before I was ever on these new pills – I rationalised, but not before I went to check to be sure.

To be sure – that seems to be the feeling, whether I am sure of that thought, that action, the feeling, that whatever expression it might be – sure, I am sure of that, if it computes – what a wonder our brains are.

On some majesty’s secret service

Vivid dreams?  I had one, a city-wide black-out, a candle light where I was ensconced until it was raided by North Korean agents who eventually found me but before they had the time to torture me for information I did not have a smart agent got me out of harm’s way.

In our embassy (Do not know which country I was a citizen of), we saw 3 double-agents, well-armed, debriefing a prized asset under implied duress and ready to do harm – we however had access to the central air-conditioning system controls with the security clearance to quarantine areas for oxygen replacement therapy resulting in the delivery of condolences to the agents who had once been exposed to a particular chemical which the asset had never been exposed to.

The smart agent had been on rescue missions like this before if we could access his “Red” files including one where the rogue got chewed up by water closet in a toilet cubicle without neighbouring occupants noticing what was going on – all recorded for the files.

I needed to wake up from all this stuff – I eventually did – what a trip that was.