Zeroth, initial observation: My threshold for caffeine-induced paranoia and visual disturbances seems to be incredibly low. I had a cup of coffee -- mediocre Keurig coffee. I am tripping balls right now and recording it for posterity.
First, a brief observation: Since I started my job, I've experienced more fasciculations (mostly in my legs and arms) than prior to starting my work. Still not very many, and definitely nothing to be concerned about. And almost certainly related to my lack of sleep + bad posture + caffeine intake. Anyway. Read about bening fasciculation syndrome, which is just something where you get a lot of fasciculations. Totally harmless. Started experiencing more fasciculations after reading about it.
Then I read that fasciculations could be a symptom of ALS. At this point, I started experiencing fasciculations everywhere, constantly. Did further research. Found out that the ALS fasciculations aren't something you'd actually feel and are localized to a single part of a body part, and are not all over. Fasciculations promptly stopped upon reading this.
tl;dr I am really good at inducing psychogenic symptoms.
After finding some episodes of Fraggle Rock on Youtube, I decided to delve further intoooo nostalgic childhood TV shows, namely Eureeka's Castle, Fred Penner's Place, and The Elephant Show, all three of which have elements of misremembrance to them, for me (I watched a lot of other shows when I was younger but those memories are too salient to be useful -- there's no cookie crumbs in them, which isn't helping me with... whatever).
So here's the thing. You're three. You see an episode of something. Maybe you misinterpret what's going on in the episode based on your limited worldview/based on Canadian children's TV being odd as fuck. Whatever. You start conflating this with other things.
In particular, I remember two episodes of The Elephant Show -- one involving a power outage and one involving elephant's shadow becoming its own entity (I remember other episodes, but these two are important). In the power outage episode, I... remember the woodsy guy using an exercise bike to power a generator, but I also remember something with elephant getting like, duplicated and doing something within a limited time period that wouldn't have been possible if Elephant hadn't been duplicated.
That sort of wonky bullshit was actually pretty par for course for the show. So something like that happening (and making about as much sense as my description) is far from out of the question.
I don't think this actually happened though. How the scene, as I remembered it, panned out is that one of the musicians (Sharon or Lois who gives a fuck I don't !!) sees Elephant outside of the house, doing something out in the street. Except Elephant is black, instead of gray. Elephant is also somewhere inside of their house at this point. I think this was actually a dream I had about the show, though, because the way I remember the house in that episode wasn't the actual house they used as a set, but my grandmother's house.
Cue paranoia in that I'm not really sure that maybe I didn't actually see something really fucked up that violated my perception of reality and my mind just... back repaired it into thinking it was an episode of the elephant show.
Cue paranoia as my mom's creepy-ass Chatty Cathy doll is currently staring at me.
Cue paranoia when my mom and some of her coworkers described a paranormal encounter they had at camp two weeks ago.
Cue paranoia when I've been under a lot of stress lately and I think my mind might be synthesizing and flushing DMT as a result. Even though there's nothing about this that makes sense it's just like fuck I have this constant delusion that I'm hallucinating except I'm not.
Objects getting duplicated, or multiple instances of the same object coming into existence, or objects existing in multiple places at the same time, are a recurring element in the only dreams of mine that I can really call nightmares. That's why that save game corruption in Morrowind, that caused sign posts to get duplicated, freaked me out so much.
Gonna go nuke some Manchurian Dumplings and turn on some lights. I think the key problem here is that I drank a cup of coffee tonight, even though my caffeine tolerance has tanked immensely.
