Has this ever happened to you? You wake up one morning, probably on the first day of the work week, after having spent your weekend unwinding in the great outdoors or pottering around the house attending to much-needed repairs — and suddenly the world around you is unrecognisable.

Twenty-four or 48 hours after you left it ticking fine, you find the colours and hues around you have changed. The sky is a different shade of blue altogether. All those grey and black dots that polluted it and obstructed your view of above were gone.

You are about to sigh appreciatively when you notice strange sounds around you. Bird calls blend in with your thoughts, snippets of conversation actually make sense, the cries of vendors are decipherable and yes, even a couple of impatient horns of vehicles speeding past are heard.

You step out a little further: The pavement that had jumped up at you for weeks, catching you unawares as you tried to walk a few steps to the friendly neighbourhood grocer, seem to have levelled out miraculously and you are no longer careening from side to side on wobbly legs, but are able to walk upright with your eyes on passersby, not on their feet. Obviously some municipal authorities or environmental workers have been busy doing something for the comfort of ordinary citizens while you were whiling away your weekend.

You adjust the car mirror and catch a glimpse of yourself — and give a start. Overnight, almost magically it seems, your hair has grown, puffed out and is billowing around your face in happy clouds. And the face that stares back at you in wonder is unrecognisable too. Your eyes are strangely pale. Where is the familiar red-blooded you?

You skin feels different. There is something flattish about it. You run your hand over it and take another look in the mirror — and do a double take. Not only has your skin taken on a different texture and a different tone, there is something not quite normal with your hand as well. Now you suspect that you’ve had a Rip Van Winkle experience in reverse. You check the newspaper quickly. The date seems fine. You haven’t gone back into the past. You are not in a time warp. Then how has the usual shape of your hand changed so drastically? It has lost its curved, domed, claw-like look. You clench and unclench it a couple of times. It seems to be working fine. You inspect your fingers to make sure they are your own and haven’t been transplanted without your knowledge. The nails are still bitten down to the quick; at last, one thing familiarly unaesthetic. You hide them behind your back.

Hey, wait a minute! Where has your comfortable, pillowy back gone? What is going on? In place of your curved spine is a straight backbone and square shoulders attached to firm limbs. Why are you no longer the red-eyed, puffy-faced weekday person you look at blearily in the mirror? Did you wave a magic wand? What happened to that floppy, slouched, hunched figure with earphones flattening your hair and blocking out all sound but electronic tweets and alerts while your eyes are fixed — and fixated — on a screen, leaving them bloodshot and heavy-lidded and unable to focus on anything but that screen?

Could just one weekend without your ‘fix’ of electronic dependence change you so drastically?

You give a slight shiver. You’ve read about this and now it’s happening to you. You don’t know how to handle it. Before delirium tremens strike, you reach for your laptop and boot it up.

Ping, it goes, and you sigh with relief. Ah, you have washed off the weekend’s withdrawal symptoms. You are yourself again.

Cheryl Rao is a freelance journalist based in India.