searching for answers.

I don’t know what else to say but that I’m over-tired. E-Niner didn’t go to sleep until 5AM because he is scared of having another bad dream. We gave him sleeping medicine and clonidine, but it is as if his fears are stronger than any kind of pharmaceutical potion.

These breakdowns feel different than those he’s had in the past because he is telling me about things that I know don’t exist. Last night when I put him down the first time, he howled twenty minutes after I had left the room. There was a fish tail in the corner of his bed and he could feel it on his hand.

“Your mind is playing tricks on you,” I said. “There are no fish or fish tails here.”

“Why is my mind playing tricks on me?” he asked.

I had no answer, because I have the same question. Why? Why is this happening?

I want this to stop. I want this whole warped world to come to an immediate end.

What is happening when people have these hallucinations? Can you will them to stop?

I picked up a few books from the bookstore: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks (a book I adored since reading it for a writing class in college), A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, and Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl by “Renee.”

The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl is at once something I want to eat up, take in, soak down to my bones — especially since this girl had her first hallucination at five years old, the same age E-Niner is now. At the same time, these intimate details she gives of her perception of the world — how people, objects, connections seem to fall away only to be replaced by a terrorizing vastness — are images that scare me for E-Niner.

I pray for E-Niner that he doesn’t experience that unrelenting feeling of living in doom, but perhaps he does?

How do I save my son from his own mind?