The flu-like symptoms I had lasted only about 24 hours and I am back. When I feel sick, which fortunately rarely happens, what I do is take to bed and sleep as much as I can, my only sustenance being dilute sweetened orange juice (50% juice, 50% water, plus four tablespoons of sugar for a liter of the mixture). That is the only thing that I can take that overcomes the deadened taste buds that flu causes. I avoid any medication unless the symptoms are really severe.
Like most home remedies, I doubt that this strategy has any beneficial effect. The duration of the flu and its severity is driven largely by the nature of the virus. But I must say that doing nothing in bed for a day, not reading or watching anything or surfing the web, can be quite relaxing. It sort of clears the mind. I have never been to a spa but imagine that the experience must be similar.
The one odd feature is that since I am slipping in and out of sleep every couple of hours, I have a lot of dreams, or at least remember a lot of my dreams, and some of them are really weird. Not frightening weird, just absurd weird, like the one where we had moved into a new house in a new neighborhood and my main concern was to find out the day when the trash pick up was and whether I had to separate the recyclables. I wonder what Freud would have made of that.
That’s remarkably close to my own remedy, except I would replace the sugar with 500 ml of processed sugar, aka vodka.
I have always found that when I have similar symptoms, a trip to the doctor will see them gone in 3 days. If i stay home and self medicate it takes 72 hours.
I’ve noticed that my vivid and weird dreams are the ones that occur after I wake up in the morning and then fall back asleep. And they are usually *crazy* dreams. I wonder if all my dreams are crazy, and these are the only ones I remember, or if we dream more vividly when we wake up and fall back asleep (I’m guessing it’s lighter sleep so our cognitive functions are only somewhat impaired, allowing an illogical mess with some semblance of reality to still form).
Marshall,
Since my retirement, I now have the luxury of going back to sleep after waking in the morning and, like you. find that then is when I have the most vivid and wackiest dreams.