Fighting through the haze?

You don't wake up from the blow... Not really. Rather the world returns to you in brief flashes of sensations just beyond your ability to understand. The sight of a tiled floor. Your head swims, your stomach nauseous. A long face chiseled with wrinkles. An ache in your neck. An open void. Deep silence.

The flashes are interrupted by a heavy and mysterious sense of contentment, as if you're floating in a moonlit pool amidst a sea of fiery stars, where each pinprick of undulating light is another cluster of cells in your confused mind. It's in these moments that you are the most lucid, and it is these moments that dominate your reality. For you, there is no break between each dip into that well of weighty contentment, though in your mind, you know time has passed.

You watch the constellations of your mind in this esoteric state with wonder. They shift, they flow, but something doesn't quite seem right. An agitation stirs within your otherwise drowzy soul, and after the passing of multiple sessions, you begin to understand why. The wild and free patterns of the cerebral starscape has begun to change, reform, and orient into a rigid pattern. It's not ugly, quite the opposite. It renders before your senses a beauty of balance and perfection, like a fractal mandala... And yet, it feels rigid. So you resist. You feel confined. So you defy. Your contentment is smothered, and so you rage.

And at last, you awaken...