Codeine delirium dreams.

My junior year in college, I came down with one of those nasty winter illnesses, combination cold-strep throat-fever-dizziness sort of things. The university health center doctor ran his tests and then offered the scientific opinion that the best thing I could do for myself was to sleep for about four days straight, and gave me some codeine to support this endeavor.

There are actually many stories that branch off from this particular week of my life, but this one is that I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my room -- I had a loft bed, but given my relative state of illness-delirium, I figured I'd be safer on the floor where there was nowhere to fall. I was sleeping in a codeine-induced haze, and dreaming that little beady-eyed rats were crawling all over me. I woke up! and there was a pair of beady little eyes staring right at me!

Normally this is the part of the story where Our Heroine screams, but I swear I just thought some variation of this isn't the way I wanted to die. After a moment it became clear that the eyes belonged to my suite-mate Maryellen's hedgehog. Need to catch hedgehog and put it back in pen, I thought. Never mind that I was delirious, it was the middle of the night and the hedgehog was in no imminent danger. I grabbed for the hedgehog. Tigger made a run for it. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen a hedgehog, but despite Sega's claim, these are not creatures that are built for speed. They're like little beach balls with tiny feet.

So let us compare the speed of a hedgehog with the speed of a half-awake, sick, and feverish Cindy. Behold the slow-motion ballet of the absurd: I fumble, Tigger ducks under the desk, I lunge, Tigger scurries just out of range, I start crawling around on hands-and-knees in pursuit. Tigger is winning.

This is when I get the brilliant idea of throwing a piece of clothing over the hedgehog. This will slow him down, I will have a larger target to lunge at, plus no damage from extended hedgehog quills. I grab a purple sweater from -- let's be honest -- the floor, where most of my dirty clothes were, and throw it over the hedgehog. On the second try, I succeed in trapping him. I scoop up the bundle of sweater, deposit hog in pen, go back to sleep.

In the morning, I look around my room and am convinced that the whole hedgehog episode was either a dream or a hallucination, shrug it off and go to breakfast. But when I come back, I poke my head into Tigger's cage, and sure enough, caught in his little quills are linty tufts of purple sweater fuzz.

Friday 25 January, 11:17 AM