Freudian slippage, blood sugar, or spiritual awakening

Strange dreams, if only I could remember them.  Yesterday I woke up in a blind panic after having slept soundly for at least six hours.  When I woke up the world was spinning, I don’t mean like I woke up and felt hung over or a little tipsy.  No when I woke up yesterday I felt like I was descending on a roller costar or trapped in an airplane corkscrewing down to earth.  I was violently dizzy.

Being half asleep I was in a confused irrational panic unsure what universe I had woken up to – all gravity and no bottom, falling, falling…I rolled on to my stomach and got on my hands and knees.    Eventually I made it on to my feet and after about 5 minutes of total confusion I was able to regain some sense of balance and wandered over to LongHall.  Thinking food was the culprit, I ate a couple of bananas.  No sooner had I tried to lie down and relax for a spell then the world started spinning again.  I had to stand up.

All day I felt lightheaded, like I was tripping on LSD.  I even had the thought that maybe I had ingested something sinister, maybe food poisoning.  That was impossible thought because I had just been sleeping of at least six hours.  I found that as long as I was standing or sitting up I could maintain  control but if I lied down and really started to relax I would slip into a kind of trance which would start pleasantly enough but would then escalate into a feeling g vertigo resulting in a panic, a feeling like I was losing control, as though the laws of physics suddenly broke down around me and I was getting sucked into the sky.

This happened not every time I laid down, when I took a break from building my shelter to relax for a minute I still felt strange but not out of control.  Was only a problem when I laid down with a clear head and allowed my mind to drift.  In total I had about 8 episodes yesterday thorough the day.  Today, the day after, I still feel peculiar, different, changed.  No frightening dizzy spells like yesterday (not yet anyway) yet things look and sound different, more intense.
Being a long weekend for labor day quite a few folks have decided to come out So far here are the possible explanations:

Ear infection
Apparently inner ear infections can cause a sense of vertigo and dizzy spells.  From what I understand one can sometimes have an inner ear infection without any real obvious symptoms (swollen lymph nodes, sore throught, etc.)Thing is someone who had experienced and ear infection told me the dizziness was mostly when standing up.  This was not at all the case for me; I had to stand up to relieve my vertigo.  Also while I felt strange all day I would only really get dizzy when I was lying down, totally relaxed and “letting go.”

Blood Sugar levels – Diabetes
Hearing someone describe what it feels like for diabetics when their blood sugar level get too low (dizzy, feel like you’re going to passout) had me convinced that low blood sugar levels could well be the cause.  My only doubts arise from the fact that although I’ve been losing some weight my eating patterns have not really changed much over the last few weeks.  What’s more is that I had eaten a hardy dinner the night before the episode.  Among the many incredible people one finds hanging out at Lothorien is a group of campers who show up almost every weekend and cook up a storm.  I was stuffed when I went to bed that night and I was eating all day.  Also the symptoms continued even after eating another huge diner.  Still I’m going to try to find my way to a doctor and see if I can get my blood sugar measured.

Cerebral Fluid
So another back-story to my whole primitive living experience is that I’m dealing with a military service related back injury.  It’s a topic for another post but the night before a particularly talented healer was doing some work on my back including message and Reiki treatment.  One possible theory offered by a practicing nurse is that a compressed disc in my back may have release some locked up cerebral fluid which can cause the symptoms mentioned.  Frankly I did not quite understand the whole explanation but it makes sense mostly because much to my amazement and overwhelming gratitude I feel a significant improvement with my back condition.

Hysteria
It could very well be that the whole event was triggered by some kind of repressed emotions.  This was in fact one of the first causes that I suspected.  It is a particularly intriguing diagnosis.  For starters, aside from my back pain, I basically feel as healthy as I’ve ever been – no fevers or headaches etc.   Furthermore the episode started following a deep sleep.  I came right out of a dream into a panic.  Unfortunately I have no recollection of what I was dreaming about other than a vague memory of competing with an Asian girl (who looked remarkably like a collage girlfriend) in and Olympic javelin throwing contest – some obvious food for psychoanalytic thought in that dream snippet.
Also, it’s been almost four weeks that I’ve been on this three year primitive living experiment.  Even in that relative short amount of time I’ve learned an immense amount about myself.  Most of my self discoveries are not quite ripe enough to put into words, yet I’m uncovering many thought patterns related to how I deal with various challenges.  Part of what makes primitive living so interesting is that the majority of the effort put forth in day to day living is directly related to one’s own preservation and comfort or the preservation and comfort of one’s tribe.  It’s easy in a corporate environment to find excuses to be lazy or put things off.  In a primitive situation though the typical excuses one uses to avoid whatever it is that needs to be done simply don’t apply revealing the deeper more fundamental roots of various forces which prevent taking action to solves various needs.  As such I’m starting to discover all kinds of insecurities, self doubts, and bad habits which get in the way of getting things done.  Perhaps I struck a raw nerve.  In fact a rather strange sensation is overtaking me even now as I dive into this diagnosis.

Spiritual Awakening
Could I have woken up to some kind of shamac like experience yesterday.  I’d like to think so, after all in some ways I am in the woods seeking spiritual understandings which I believe can only be realized while living close to the earth.  Unfortunately though I really did not feel any spiritual presence and actually the whole experience felt very internal, from within not from without.  None the less all day I felt extremely sensitive like my senses where hyper mode, sounds – birds chirping, mice darting through the underbrush, wind through the leaves – like I was listing through a pair of head phones with the volume cranked all the way up.  I could see things I never noticed before including, oddly enough, toads.  I noticed toads everywhere, hiding under a leaf in my shelter, hidden in the mud by the pond, everywhere I looked seemed like there was a toad hiding out there.  To be honest it was a pleasant sensation really until I lied down to relax, then everything felt as if it was overwhelming, sensory overload, I’d get a vertigo like sensation, panic and have to stand up.

In Conclusion
In the end I really have no idea what was going on yesterday.  Today I feel lingering effects yet nothing nearly as dramatic as yesterday.   That fact that this situation only lasted about 24 hours makes any kind of certain diagnosis even trickier.   It’s just something that happened to me one day.   When I went to sleep last night I tried to just relax through the vertigo sensation and see if any repressed memories surface or see if any hidden spirits manifest.  Nothing.  Apparently the cure may well be to just relax, notice the anxiety but don’t become a victim to it.  Your body, brain, and universe will occasionally through you a curve ball, and while it may scare the hell out of you the only solution may well be to relax and go with it.  Let the universe take you where it will.   Beleave me brother, this is easier said than done.