About a month ago, I began experiencing a strange succession of minor ailments that were separately annoying and uncomfortable, and together alarming and confounding.

One week I had intense nausea, an anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach – but try as I might, I couldn’t identify the cause of my anxiety.

The following week, strange headaches.

After that, aches and pain in all my joints. Then I started waking every morning sometime between 2am and 5am, alert and unable to return to sleep.

In short, I was out of sorts.

What was wrong with me?

I Googled these symptoms and found out rather alarmingly that the only thing they all matched was something called ascension flu (or ascension hangover).

Ascension flu? Wot? I had never heard of it.

Apparently a “spiritual hangover is when you are awakening on a deeper soul level. What is happening is that your whole body from the cells to the chemistry in your body is changing and shifting at rapid speeds. It feels like you are dying or there is something seriously wrong with you.”

I was genuinely shocked. How could I have lived this long and not heard about this condition? No one I know had ever, say, cancelled dinner because they had ascension flu or complained that the ascension hangover was actually worse than that night they mixed the Baileys with Fanta.

Even after years of researching the wellness industry for my book Wellmania, I had never heard a whisper of ascension flu. It was a secret illness.

Yet here it was in a lively corner of the internet, where there were thousands of people on Wordpress blogs complaining about being sick because their DNA was updating. Did I have it? It was unlikely since I was a lapsed Catholic atheist who did not have a spiritual practice.

It also seemed, quite frankly, undesirable to get it. Symptoms could go on for years, and as well as “feeling like you are dying” when you recovered, your old life was gone.

After he had a shift in consciousness, Eckhart Tolle, who has since sold millions of books worldwide on spiritual matters, wrote about sitting on a London park bench for two years. He had no money, no friends, no job and was in a state of complete bliss. Call me shallow but I’d rather dwell in the lower realms with my friends, than sit alone on a park bench in bliss.

Yet, still, I wanted to rule out that I had this strange condition. I found a list claiming to be the “most comprehensive list of ascension symptoms” – and felt dread as I ticked it off.

Changing sleep patterns. Yes.

Tingling at the top of the head. Yes – my head had started to tingle!

Vivid, sometimes violent dreams. Yes. Every night, a massacre.

Blurry vision. Yes. I thought it was just dirty contact lenses.

Skin eruptions. Yes, a cluster of pimples on my skin which hadn’t appeared since I was a teenager.

Falling, having accidents, breaking bones. Yes! Only last week I had come off my bike at Rottnest Island, over the handlebars and on to bitumen. I also tripped down stairs. I broke two hire bikes in one day after snorkel gear became entangled in the wheels. I got clipped by a car walking on a busy road in Canggu and almost fell in a ditch.

I also forgot the name for that thing, you know the thing you heat water in? I sometimes heard weird high frequency sounds like a dog or a teenager can. And I felt everything. I could feel the sadness and loneliness of my Uber drivers radiating throughout the car – and when I later went to rate them, just the sight of their avatar made my eyes well with tears. I was probably just tired. Or I had a low-level flu.

But also – I did not want to ascend! I was happy where I was. The websites warned that if I ascended I would no longer be satisfied with my job and friends, and would leave them for a purple templated, badly formatted Wordpress corner of the internet.

I shook myself out of it, thinking it was all just a coincidence. I did not have ascension flu.

Then in Perth this week I got my phone out and it was dead. At the hotel I tried to charge it but it wouldn’t receive the current.

Oh no! This was the big one. The ascension symptom that was the most bizarre and frightening was actually happening to me.

“Electrical and mechanical malfunctions: When you are around, light bulbs flicker, the computer locks up, or the radio goes haywire.”

No! No! I took the phone down to reception. Maybe my charger was broken.

“What do you think happened to it?” asked the clerk after it had failed to turn on despite being on the charger for 20 minutes.

“I don’t know – maybe it’s because I’m ascending …” I had not spoken about this with anyone. He looked at me expectantly.

“... maybe I am ascending. To level 8. To my room. I will take it with me.”

The next morning I went to the Apple store. The technician tried four different plugs but it still wouldn’t charge. But when she took it out a backroom, further away from me, suddenly the phone sprang to life.

When I returned with the phone back to my hotel, it died again. It only seemed to charge if I was far away, in another room.

Nice knowing you all.

I resigned myself to living on a higher realm and walking about blowing out lights and computers. No wonder monks lived in caves. There was nothing to break in there.

But four days later, my phone is working again. And last night I slept right through. And I can’t remember my dreams. And I took an Uber with a driver that didn’t make me want to cry. Maybe like all flus, the memories of it are like fever dreams. Did it even really happen? This too shall pass.