Feverish Thoughts

I seldom get sick.  I’ve been told this is one of the boons of middle age—the maladies of childhood pass and it take more to bring you down.  A swift-moving bug, however, recently caught me and kept me awake all night thinking the end had come.

Ironically, I associate being sick with writing.  I was  a sickly child.  Skinny and frail I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and actually missed a large portion of seventh grade because of recurring bouts of illness.  I attempted to write my first novel in such a febrile state.

A science-fiction fan, I began scrawling about a ship at sea attached by some weird creature.  My novel didn’t have much of a plot and my skills were, well, juvenile.  A couple more false starts accompanied me through high school, but few people beyond my two closest friends, knew I wrote.

Of course, I don’t have to be sick to write.  In this workaday world, however, a brief illness affords an opportunity to write during the middle of the day when you’re too ill to get out of bed but not too ill to tap on your keyboard.

This strange bug kept me awake nearly the whole night through, so I kept drifting off to sleep during the day.  Dreams when I’m ill are especially vivid.  I can see why people sometimes think writers like Poe sometimes used opium for inspiration.  A virus will do.

During one of my intense periods of sleep I dreamt that I’d started a writing club.  A friend I met online agreed to come to a general organizational meeting.  I was back at my stepfather’s house and he stared hawklike at the fancy car my friend drove.  It was clear James had some money.

To my surprise my sister came to the meeting.  (Especially surprising because I don’t have a sister.)  My writing partner Elizabeth was there, of course.  I tried to get the meeting going, but every time discussion started, James had to go work on his car.  He told me it kept going through fuses.

I leaned out the window and said, “If it’s going through fuses, it’s an electrical problem.  Could be your alternator.  Don’t ask me where your alternator is, I don’t even know what one looks like.”  Although a dream, that last part is true.

I awoke to remember that I was indeed sick and that this feverish story was part of an overactive, febrile imagination.  It is said that madness and creativity are of a piece.  I would also add in illness, as it make you see things otherwise invisible.