The Pits of Flatåsen

Imagine: ten days of wanting to lick bacon grease off parchment paper while guarding your family from a dimensional rift in the living room floor.

This was me having COVID.

From a medical perspective, high fevers can absolutely cause hallucinations, altered perception, vivid dreams, and strange thought patterns. Some people get confused. Some get agitated. Some see things. Some become convinced they have solved the mysteries of the universe.

I apparently became the curator of a bacon-powered cosmic excavation site.

While I was on the living room sofa, temperature at 42.5, wrapped up like an odd chrysalis, and there was a gaping hole on the floor. There was a cold breeze coming up from it and it smelled like a teenage boy’s sweaty socks.

I knew (somehow?) that this hole was the abyss that eats worlds. I was curious and wanted to see inside of it but I was also afraid that I would never return if I jumped in.

Fever hallucinations often are not random in the way people imagine. They tend to feel completely real and obey their own internal logic.

My brain was not saying: “Look! A pink elephant!”

It was saying: “There is a hole. It is dangerous. I am curious about it. I should investigate. But if I fall in, I may not return.”

That sounds more like dream logic than psychosis (mostly). The brain takes ordinary concepts—curiosity, risk, exploration—and turns them into a physical landscape.

It sounds a bit like some of the imagery people describe during fever dreams, deep meditation, sensory deprivation, or psychedelic experiences. The emotional reality becomes spatial.

And then poor Paul walks into the room.

“Do you want something to eat?”

Meanwhile I am engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the Abyss.

“BACK AWAY, FOOL. THE FLOOR IS COMPROMISED.”

Now about the bacon grease.

I am not a bacon fan. To say I even like to eat animal flesh is a stretch.

Most people lost their sense of taste or smell with COVID.

My body apparently looked at a global pandemic and decided: “I require salt. I require fat. I require pig.”

My low blood pressure, electrolyte issues, and the fact that I was running a high fever, it is almost funny in retrospect. Fever means fluid loss. Salt becomes valuable. Fat is calorie-dense and easy energy.

Was my body intelligently requesting bacon grease? Probably not in such a direct way. But I bet Paul thought it was amusing to watch me drink it while standing in front of the oven.

I tried to keep writing during this time. I felt like Lovecraft documenting inter-dimensional travels while looking dapper in Providence. 

This fever state left me with incoherent gibberish in fragments.

I am lifelong journal keeper who has been writing since childhood, and I tend to notice  strange internal experiences, jotted down in vivid sensory metaphors (though if you use a metaphor please do not expect me to understand without an explanation).

It was less Lovecraft and more like: Timothy Leary got locked in a lighthouse with Virginia Woolf and a package of bacon.

No one is surprised, right?

My story is not: “COVID was awful.”

My Covid adventure: “I discovered a hole in reality and developed a romantic attachment to bacon grease.”

Which is a much better story.