It is with much gratitude that I can share with you a snippet of an ongoing project that I have been working on for some time via Resting Up. Resting Up Collective are the wonderful group of people I have been fortunate enough to connect with over the last 6 months, and I highly recommend reading more here, following on Instagram and subscribing to their wonderful monthly showcase over on substack.
Click here to read the snippet available: https://restingupcollective.substack.com/p/neuro-pictomancy-a-communication
I have also included below an additional excerpt of the piece; a diary entry from the most vivid recent experience I had which led to my first neurology trip. The accompanying video/painting is created by me, called ‘The Wall & the Ceiling’ and is a pretty accurate depiction of what I so clearly remember watching from bed.
Example: The Wall & the Ceiling
I had previously believed that all my hallucinations were to do with my various states of mental health, however about 3 years ago I had a few bizarre experiences that I eventually went to the doctor with. Below is a description of one of the “weird things” I initially went to the neurologist for, after numerous referrals to the emergency eye hospital with doctors thinking it was a tumour at the front of my brain, messing with my optic nerves.
Winter 2017
I was in an ex-partners flat, which we had collaged from bed-post to bath to sink to wall and floor in order to raise money for Mind. Entering the flat is quite a trippy experience for most people, but I stayed there a lot and so to me it was normal. One day I woke up on my own in the flat absolutely fine at about 11am. I messed about on my phone for a bit, then sat up to decide whether to get dressed and leave, or to make a coffee. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that one framed picture was bulging and swirling like marbled paint. I stared at it, blinked and rubbed my eyes in disbelief like a Disney character and looked around the rest of the flat. I noted that I was not light-headed, scared, anxious, or having any other visual disturbances. I looked back at the framed picture. Contained within the frame, I could see purple and yellow thick glossy paint swirling around, and bulging forward out of the frame. I knew that these colours were not in the actual image that was on display in the frame, as that was mostly monotonous. I kept looking around the room, but everything else seemed totally normal. I just watched it, confused, for what felt like ten minutes. I then noticed that the ceiling, which at this point was still white and had not been covered in collaged art & magazine pages, was host to a huge billowing blob of purple and yellow paint right in the middle. The rest of the ceiling was still white, and I could see the frame on the wall was still swirling different colours around, a few new ones added to the purple and yellow. Then as I looked around the room, very confused, again, the walls started to heave inwards and back out again, as though they were taking deep breaths in and out. None of this was scary, the colours were pleasant and I loved watching them swirl around like marbled ink. The purple was so bright and the yellow so vivid that they never “mixed” like paint would into a weird brown. They just tangoed with one another. This carried on for what felt like a few minutes, and then I decided to lie down. It continued but died down a little bit, and I checked the time on my phone: almost an hour had passed. I was suddenly overwhelmed with sleepiness, so I decided to go back to sleep, with the room having it’s own colour party around me. I then was totally out for 5 hours. I woke up and nothing was moving, the swirling was gone and the walls weren’t breathing. I was mildly disappointed.
