This morning, an ignored 6.30 am fire drill yanked the drip of sleep from my vein, coinciding with a feebly apocalyptic flash of amber light from the kitchen in the opposite building. It revealed, to sleep-encrusted eyes, a phrase scrawled on the wall in day-glo pink:

CANKER LOUSE

In sleep, much madness is divinest sense, and it was so for a few addled minutes until the suffocating realisation that this was not the only thing written on the wall brought me to a fearful state of magnified perception. I arose, sweat prickling my top lip and my gaze fixed on these scrawls, and it dawned on me that these words - some ugly snatches of lyrics from songs that often follow me down into slumber and permeate my dreams, some ominous in their blank, black incoherence - were by my own hand, animated in sleep by God knows what. Or maybe he doesn’t. In a manner reminiscent of The Shining, one half of the side of my room was (and is) covered in spasmodic, maddening words, and turning I observed that my pillow was stained with lurid pink ink from the highlighter that I had evidently seen fit to return to bed in the company of afterwards. It is, even now, lying on the floor - lidless, spent, and guilty by association. The cumulative effect (though not in order, as that isn't possible with typing) is thus:

it walks away*

lice of viper

GANGLIA

damn oily horror bat

insect insect insect

heart sweat flesh strings

utopia UTOPIATE

From halfway up the wall to near the ceiling, there is a swathe of a line, at the top if which it reads TOOK OFF, and a swirling scribble which could be anything. This is all bad enough in itself, but what makes it considerably worse is the fact that it won’t come off, despite various unguents and much scrubbage. The same goes for my face, which has an incriminatingly tasteless pink blotch on the cheek and chin. I don’t know what to tell housekeeping – though perhaps the truth is the only thing to tell them i.e. that I require a nightime straitjacket and my bedside absinthe should be confiscated. And my highlighters.

Does this sort of thing happen to anyone else? Even if it doesn't perhaps someone could kindly pretend it does just to make me feel better.

*This repeatedly and scrawled with increasing ferocity and size.