With Fire

Because it was a dream, I didn't think that clearing the verandah by pouring flammable liquid on it and setting it alight was a bad idea at all.

The flames started at the front, and slowly progressed around both sides of the house. I went inside to read a book while it was happening. It wasn't until some time had gone by that I realised that there were things on the verandah that might get burned, including washing hanging on the line on the right side of the house, when looking at it from the back. Frantically I tried to get it all in, but the line was too high and I couldn't reach all of it. It didn't matter though, because the fire burned itself out before it got that far.

On the other side of the house (the left side when looking from the back) there were several large spider webs, complete with large spiders, that did not get burned because the fire didn't make it that far. There was also a bottle of something alcoholic hanging by a window, but I can't remember the significance of that.

Upcoming D&D Posts

So my D&D group, which has been playing 5th edition for about a year, is shortly to be changing DMs and moving the campaign in a new direction. Some players are getting new characters, and I - up until now the DM - am becoming a player myself and have created a character.

The character will be creating a diary of his adventures. I'll post those entries here. I'll use a specific label for them - d&dgame, so if you're clever I expect you can create a filter for them if you really care to.

I expect that these diary postings will dominate this particular feed for a while.

The Scintillating Scotoma

Have you ever wondered whether you'll go blind or deaf first?

I'm pretty sure that I know that I'll go blind in my dotage, rather than deaf. And the reason is that I experience a thing called scintillating scotomas.

Basically, this is a distortion in my visual field. It appears, grows, moves slowly and goes away after maybe ten to twenty minutes. It's hard to describe exactly what it looks like, though I've described it as "wrigglies". It's not like the "floaters" that people sometimes experience - those are actual protein fragments in the eyeball, whereas my scotomas are still visible when I close my eyes. Wikipedia has a couple of artists' impressions of what it looks like, but none of them really reflect what I see. This is perhaps the closest:


"Scintillating scotoma" by Mikael Häggström.

Even this isn't really accurate, since the background image still shows distinctly through the distortion. When I experience it, it really does disrupt what I can see.

They become a problem when they cover the main part of my visual field. When this happens I can't really see anything properly - though it's because my vision is distorted rather than just seeing blackness. More often I can keep doing whatever I'm doing because the scotoma doesn't cover the primary area of visual acuity - it covers my peripheral vision, but not my central. In fact, you probably wouldn't even realise that I'm experiencing one if you were watching my behaviour at the time. Sometimes it covers just part of my central vision, and I have to look slightly sideways at things in order to see them properly.

Scintillating scotomas are usually associated with migraines - and when I was young, they were a sure sign of the onset of a headache. However, my headaches were never particularly serious, and these days I get the scotoma without a headache at all.

So far I've been lucky enough to not have it occur when I'm driving. However, the onset is gradual enough that I would certainly have time to pull over and stop if it did happen.

There's really no reason to think that it'll get worse as I get older. I just posted that as a hook to get you interested.