Ah migraines. I don’t get them as frequently as I used to, having learned how to deal with the myriad sources of stress in my life. I usually have means to bring them to heel once they have started, but the one that started yesterday just wouldn’t behave. The month of reduced sleep caught up with my ass, and feeling my skull collapse into itself warned me the next 36 hours were going to be a wild ride.
Did I mention my migraines come with hallucinations? No?
Most of them I was able to quickly dismiss as the product of an addled mind. My daughter knows that I sometimes hallucinate when in the throes of pain, so she’ll distract me from the pain by having me describe what I’m seeing. We giggle at green mice. She teases me about the walls changing color. She brings me water and measures how much I sip.
Sometimes, the pain becomes too much and I can’t bear to open my eyes, then the sound of her feet on the carpet is too much. She pulls the covers over me, sneaks the phone out of my room, and gently closes the door. When it’s just her and me in the house, the migraines are bearable. She doesn’t go out of her way to not make any noise. She doesn’t have to. When it’s just her and me, the house itself is calm, and I can rest. If anything, the odd scraps of sound I do hear, just lets me know she’s okay.
Not so when my roommates come home. They are family, but because of ideological differences (among others), the relationship is more like renter & tenant than mother & daughter. When they find out I’m suffering a migraine, they go out of their way to make even more noise. I don’t ascribe malice to their actions, just a tweaked sense of entitlement. Why should they have to be quiet in their house? (Okay, maybe a little bit of malice.)
Currently, they are fighting again. Just verbal snippets and baited wordy stabs at each other. Listening to them fight is like wrapping myself in a steel wool blanket. No matter how still I am, it’s gonna get on my nerves eventually.
Yesterday evening and for the beginning of the night, it was just my daughter and myself. And the house watched over me and the bed held me softly while the migraine twisted the sound of the fan into the screeching of a hundred serrated blades threatening to fly off the stand and begin the gory business of slicing me into so much bloody ghoul food. I thought that was an impressive hallucination, considering the fan is a tower fan, with no exposed blades. Oh well, I turned over and tried to get back to sleep.
Oh hell, they’re home. I can hear them arguing in the driveway. She felt slighted again and she won’t listen to his explanation. He’s getting frustrated that she’s twisting his words, and is starting to verbally bite back. Oh, not tonight, please. My head is at a tolerable level, I can deal with this, I can sleep through this. Don’t ratchet it up, please.
When my daughter went to bed, she opened the door and left it open so I could listen for unusual sounds. I usually greet the homecoming family, relay any messages, then close my door. But I was in just too much pain to sit up. The nausea was too much to risk.
I whispered a few cantrips, meant to disguise myself in bed so if they peeked in, they would think me fully asleep and not struggling to keep from tossing from the sudden sonic assault. And then the light burst into the room.
Or rather, the Light descended into the room.
My curiosity greater than my distaste for vomit, I carefully turn over and peek an eye over the covers. Yup, there is a shaft of brightest, whitest Light piercing my ceiling and holding fast over the door’s threshold. The door is open, but the house is shadowed beyond the shaft. I can barely see my family walking down the hall.
Okay, Light. Yea, purty. Not hurting my eyes though. Whatever. I start to turn back over to sleep, when an angel descends through the Light onto the threshold of the door. Okay, now it has become interesting. The angel turns to face me, and greets me in the name of the Lord Most High.
Wait, what the fuck? Didn’t Jehovah get my divorce papers?
“Good evening, Angel. I must admit, you’re damn good for a hallucination. I usually don’t get this kind of detail other than in a lucid dream.” The angel smiles, ker eyes already glowing with an inner Light, the smile only brightens them.
The angel doesn’t address my accusation. “I will guard your door this night. You will have space to rest, and the trouble without will not enter.” Both my eyebrows raise at the words. The angel starts to turn to face without the room, but my question stops kem.
“Angel, of whom are you a messenger?” The angel turns back to face me. I sit up in bed to take a closer look at the angel. The garment covering kem looks like a thin sheet of light loosely wrapped around the angel’s body. A thin build of body, a round adolescent face. Shoulder length ringlets of liquid gold hair danced in the air.
“I am a servant of the Lord Most High. And I have been sent to guard your door this night.” I didn’t know how to answer that. I looked up at the shaft of Light still piercing my ceiling. I could not see the source, but the light was not painful to look at. I glanced over at my clock, turning on the night light. The dim blue glow felt like a sucker punch. I looked back to the angel, who seemed to be waiting for my response.
“Well, um. Thank you. I do appreciate that. Um, you do know I walked away from Christianity, right? I don’t want any conflict here, or any implied debts.”
The angel smiled again, and faintly laughed. It sounded like a baby’s cheerful squeal. I could not help but smile and chuckle in response. “What does that have to do with me?” The angel was matter-of-fact in ker response. “The Lord Most High said to me, go to her, and place yourself at her door, so that none will disturb her, so that she will have rest. So the Lord Most High said to me, and so I am here to do.”
Hallucination or not, there’s no way to argue with logic like that.
“I thank you, angel, and thank the god that sent you. I will not argue if this gift is fitting to me or not. Do as the Lord Most High has told you, and I will sleep in peace.” The angel bowed slightly as the nausea reasserted itself and I was forced to lay down again. Once horizontal, I was able to see how the angel had placed kemself.
The bedroom door was still open, but no one else in the house heard my voice, making me wonder if I had hallucinated/dreamt my words to the angel. The angel stood directly in the door frame. Ker left hand over ker chest in an act of prayer. Ker right hand lifted high over ker head in an act of blessing. I was briefly reminded of myself taking on that same position in a different dream. A flash of light briefly illumined the entire room, as the shaft of Light that had pierced the ceiling was now completely filling the door frame. I had a bedroom door made of light.
The sounds of the house faded dramatically, as if the room had been removed and I was now across the street. The usual argument continued unabated, but now I could only make out who was speaking, but none of the words said. Three times, my family tried to close my door. Each time, they reached in, passing through the angel, and was forced back, suddenly blinded. After the third time of reaching for the door and missing, my mother exclaimed to no one in particular, “Am I so blind, I can’t close the damn door?”. She reached for the door again, grabbing the knob viciously, and tried to slam the door in her frustration.
Only I saw the angel catch the door before slamming, and gently easing it closed. My mother fussed from the other side of the door about sticky hinges. The angel looked back at me one more time, then knelt on the inside of the bedroom door. Head bowed, left hand over ker chest, the right hand raised and placed firmly against the door.
In the room next to mine, I heard my parents continue the argument where they had left off. But the sounds were so distant from me, I might as well be three houses away. I looked over my shoulder one last time, watching the guarding angel silently obeying ker command. I muttered about my migraine hallucinations being stranger and stranger and drifted off to sleep.
When I woke up this morning, I knew the struggle with the migraine wasn’t over yet. I had quite the roller-coaster of pain-induced dreams. But the incident with the angel stuck out. And even after teasing about it on Twitter, it continues to remain at the forefront of my thoughts. I had to write it out to settle it, and so here it is written.
Make of that, what you may.
Comments
8 responses to “The Painful Messenger”
I have a zillion questions, but they are all encapsulated in one: what do you personally make of this?
I’m going to wait until the migraine has lifted completely before I start slicing and dicing this. Because right now, the whole event is a slice of What The Fuck.
On the one hand, I want to say, “Hallucination! Dismiss everything.” On the other hand, it had a quality to it that the migraine-induced visuals lack. (That I’m no where near sane was never in question, and should be accepted as fact by now. ~laughs~)
If we take it at face value, that I really was visited by an angel (of IHVH (Jewish), or of Jehovah (Christian), is still being argued), I’m going to have to agree with Fern’s assessment. My parents do have Christian leanings. (My mother considers non-Christians to be backwards ignorants, but she has this same opinion of anyone that doesn’t agree with her.) Don’t forget the bumper sticker, “Lord, spare me from your followers!”
If we take it as a symbol of interior struggles, then perhaps I have finally made peace with myself over leaving Christianity. I have realized that most of my issues were with the practitioners, not of the god and his messengers. The angel came to help, no strings attached, and I accepted that help, with no guilt generated.
Either way, it was pretty cool to watch.
So, that brings you down to a zillion minus two questions left on the docket. Next!
I don’t know anything about your parents, but assuming that they are somewhere in the JudeoChristianIslamic spectrum … certainly their God could have sent a spare angel to keep Its followers from being successful jerks.
I don’t yet have hallucinations, but my Mother gets them with her dementia. I suppose I have them to look forward to when I hit my 90’s. Maybe many of us will. I’m wondering if we, with histories of esoteric spiritual work and/or (for some of us) recreational drug use will be able to handle them better than she does. They make her very paranoid – before we moved her into a nursing home she had her condo painted and she had the painters check for the hidden doors in the walls that her ‘intruders’ were coming in thru’. I hope I’ll be more able to work wit them, as you shared.
A friend teases me that I don’t have to play around with the recreationals because I get all the effects of them for free. Think of all the money I’ve saved! ~laughs~
They don’t bother me anymore. The more outlandish the sight, the less I pay attention to it. Green mice? GREEN? It’s only when what I see could actually happen that I test it. I see my daughter beside my bed when I know she is at school? Tell the apparition to move something on my dresser that is too heavy to be blown about.
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I have really bad migraines too..but have never had hullucinations with them. I have always had to ‘knock’ myself out ‘cold’….or I wouldnt be able to get thru them otherwise. Do you or can you take any man made medications for your headaches?
I take Zomig, but its so expensive my insurance wont pay for it(and no patient assistant program either)…so I end up having to use Imitrex…and its really NOT doing the job…..takes forever to work and makes the migraine worse before it gets better (how stupid,yes?). Best of luck in your path and with your mean ole migraines!
Zomig was like popping Tic Tacs. Very expensive, horrible tasting, Tic Tacs. The candy would have done better. Imitrex made me feel like someone was choking me. Hands around the neck, squeezing hard. AND the pain would get worse before getting marginally better.
I went through all the arsenal, and wound up poorer for it. So now I take nothing for it. I lick some salt and start sipping water when it starts, and sleep as much as I can, and that’s it. Learning to deal with stressors helped.