Unless the cold medicine is kicking in hard I call shenanigans, you can't syphon higher then the vessel, it has to be lower.
Head pressure?
I have a ton of siphon experience and I know what your saying.
I once had two 6 inch siphons Running 24/7 for a summer, they were going up 20+ feet over an a an abandoned Train Track from Klamath Lake(large lake) into a nearby saline lake that had a low water level. I created a full lake in a few days, then used a giant PTO Pump powered by a big ancient Kubota to fill a 18 inch mainline attached to drop set farm irrigation and was run hundreds(400?) of sprinklers at the same time. I had noticed that the water level was slightly higher on the Large Lake and we set up the siphon with a garden hose at first then upgraded to 6 inch suction line using Cap and plugs and 5 gallon buckets of water to get the siphon going. It was an amazing amount of water and saved our ass on a Wetland Mitigation Contract we had signed, without the siphon set up(totally illegal) we would have lost a million dollars on the job, we ended up making 400K. It was for a profit/loss sharing co op that I used to run jobs for.