System Overload

In his head he felt the pressure of too many signals at once. In his dreams he heard the voices, people he didn't know coming into his house and talking, bombarding his brain with ideas, noises, visual stimuli. He was in the shower in his dream, they came into the house. He was at his desk and he dropped his drink. He was in the truck at the end of the road and another vehicle sped towards him.

He wouldn't call it precognition. It didn't feel like that at all. It felt more like something was trying to pulse his brain into taking outside input. He didn't know the source, and it wasn't precise enough to trigger anything specific, so it simply felt like a wall of noise.

Today the pain was especially bad. If it was a worthwhile experiment, it wouldn't be enough to want it stopped, but it wasn't exactly pleasant either. More of a headache from being overloaded with information that doesn't seem to have a place or relevance. It seemed to focus his mind, but only in as much as it blocked out everything else.

It kept him from planning, from concentrating, from enjoying, from reflecting, from feeling that anything was 'new'. Not that it mattered, there was nothing significant on his plate and it didn't feel like there would be for a very long time.

He wondered if it was his own brain generating noise to amuse itself. If it was, it was the most horrible job of doing so that he could imagine. It seemed like a cloud of misfires, all fighting each other for prominence – even though none of them had anything to 'say'.

Some dutiful, overseeing part of his psyche told him to 'keep it together' for the millionth time. He was tired of pretending he was healthy. His body had all but abandoned him, and his mind was throwing itself against the walls to distract itself from the horrible truth of his condition(s).

Days and experiences coursed through his head like a bitter poison. The barbed wire of past habits scraped against whatever soft feelings he had left. If this was coping, he hate to think what the alternative would be.