I'm recovering from being seriously ill in the days before Christmas. Monday evening, I went from being just fine to running a 101.8 fever in somewhere between one and two hours. The speed of this and how it felt reminded me of the time in January 1999 when I flew home from a business trip to Buffalo, NY and felt deathly ill by the time I got off the plane - I spent the next few days in bed with the flu, barely able to get out of bed yet almost completely unable to sleep.
This time, however, I was able to get to sleep during the height of my fever once I could stop shaking. Sometime during the night, I woke up and felt like I was too warm to keep wearing a T-shirt and it was at that point I felt as though I wouldn't land in the hospital after all. I had thought, "fat lot of good FluMist (the nasal-spray flu vaccine) did me" but I realized that that may have been why I wasn't in the emergency room or dead. But as I lay there I became aware of a vision that may have given me a rare look at my mind's inner workings.
Once I got relaxed in bed again, I perceived a sort of grid overlaid across my visual field, and in each square in the field, there would be an image, and each image changed many times a second. The grid and the images were very sharply rendered and monochromatic, and they seemed to update asynchronously - no regular timing, no order. The images changed so quickly that I could only just barely register what was in them, but I remember that I would see a simple shape, some curved lines, some dots, a face, a pattern...the simpler the image, the more I seemed able to tell what it was.
Eventually I began to wonder if in my fevered state the curtain had been pulled back on an internal mental process - something having to do with how I make sense of the visual world.
This was not a hallucination. The grid I saw was distinct from my surroundings and was not something I could even "look at" directly; it was as though it was all viewed "out of the corner of my eye" but as I already said, I could tell what was appearing in the grid squares if it was simple enough. I could not really "move my eyes" to look at any one of the squares. Rather, I prefer the term "vision" as it was something I perceived as visual.
The asynchronous nature of the image changes is one thing that made me feel like I was looking at an active mental process, and I was astonished at the mass of information involved, as though 45 years of seeing the world around me had been distilled and stored, and the things that I see day in and day out get compared against and registered with the untold millions of items that live in this grid.
Care to lend any insight?