alostlittlebird
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2003
- Messages
- 1,554
a few forethoughts: i am not racist, and i am also an american. 
My psychology teacher tried to tell me:
"Nobody knows why we need sleep!"
At the time I didn't really think much of that,
but tonight I'd like to add a comment or two.
Bearded asians in white lab coats may not have much to show
for years of beating insomniacs over the brain with microscopes,
but are there really no observations to be made? Maybe a cracked, throbbing
tooth would have helped them in their research, because as we all know,
searing pain is sleep's annoying little brother that is far too fond of playing tricks in the night.
Some amount of sleep, maybe five to nine hours, is useful every
twenty-four hours or so if one wants to keep certain symptoms at bay. To
the budding insomniac, after that first day with no sweet dreams to reset the clocks,
he has passed from day zero to day one.
Now, assuming he does not regularly run marathons for the
benefit of those riddled with sexual diseases, his whole being should be
bugging him to lay down and switch off, but if that tooth pain is bad
enough, he won't last long before brushing with benzocaine and trating
himself to an agonozing slow-mo of a surprisingly hellish sunrise.
Day one might not be so bad if his will is strong enough. That old
buddy "sense of time" speeds up and slows down, shifty as an old school
rockhead whose never sure of his score. Together with "mental clarity",
the two ever-imporant powers of the mind decide that there are better
fish to fuck and go jaunting happily out the ears, up, up, and into the sky,
dusting the wax from their shoes on the way there. The zombie in
training, camped on the couch and longing for brains, may turn his skull
upwards and in a sobbing tone say, "So long, fellas."
There is one thing guaranteed to be there for an insomniac, that
old can of glue, the television. While he sits there quietly, his glossy eyes
huffing in the intoxicating visuals, he wonders to himself whether tv is a
friend or an enemy.. Unable to decide, he may slightly realize that his
previous thought is not exactly the train he normally takes, but the
concept is quickly derailed entirely and he is once again left to silence.
In a more universal way, tv seems strangely over-symbolic. One
minute the poor guy is watching a show, the next minute he's waiting
through commercials. Interesting, then boring. Logical, then confusing. The
nature of percieved reality gets to be so random, he stops expecting any
consistency at all and just lets the flow of things drag him like a child's rAg
Doll. For a minute, there is a peculiar sensation of his limbs drifting away,
but when he reaches to put them back into place and finds them seemingly
where they were, he can rest assured that they are still securely
socketed - at least for now.
So he's almost gone forty-eight big ones, and the insomniac's
shifty mood has grown wild from another long, aching day, and the
insatiable desire to somehow fix his tooth with his tongue. He should take
my advice and save himself the insanity of making it all worse.
While he waits for the inevitable coma, spread on a mattress
cracker and staring dead-eyed at the fresh good nature of the 2am back-
to-back Cosby Show, he may be surprised to find that Bill's normally
misleading jabbering at Theo stirs an unexpected laugh from his pulsating
mouth. But the laugh is different, more retarded than usual... And while he
dodges the pain by wondering when he started laughing like that, he may
get lucky and zone out long enough to barely notice night once more
slipping into day, sparing another torturous nightmare of hating the planet
for ever adopting such a ridiculous cycle. Not to mention the ghostly mind
dentists, cackling in their weekend mansions and knowing that ice will
always be solid, and the teeth of young men neglected.
Understanding is best found through experience, or so I like to
believe. Once he's made it into the new day, it becomes clear that rest
allows the body and mind to regroup themselves in order to avoid total
collapse. Muscles and bones, organ fueling nutrients, cancer defying
vitamins and layers of well defined fatty tissue are drafted in the war on
physical decay. His attitude begins to reflect the condition of the mind,
which starves for all it's favorite neurotransmitters and grows more pissed
off that it has spent so long playing endless hours of mind over matter (a
game that gets old very quickly) without so much as an hour break to
watch dreamy naughty nurse videos spliced with intense, emotional
scenarios of falling from some tall structure, only to get one foot from the
field and hand the ball off to body #18, who, having been looking the
other way all along can do nothing better than shudder violently and give
a sheepish, confused look to the team.
Without his normal method of keeping track of it, time slides
around him like an eel, slithering along the furthest reaches of his mind
and turning over the crates of order that he has spent so long stacking.
Imagine, for a moment, that the most direct functions of his
being are being operated by some multi-armed entity that sits on his
spine, perched in front of a relatively complicated set of switch boards.
Every time the young man would sleep, that entity would trade places with
the janitor, who knows just enough about the job to keep the big calls
flowing and who is more than happy to catch a buzz off the diluted sense
of respect that such work allows. With the office in capable (enough)
hands, the entity heads home to some undisclosed north pole wonderland
to his multi-armed family. These are normal conditions, all is well.
When one doesn't sleep because there's bells and alarms
wailing away over a block of busted up calcium, that diligent, multi-armed
fool is just too dedicated (or too stupid) to drop the wires and run away
altogether. Instead, he tries to wait things out, hoping the boss is making
an effort to get things under control. With no understanding of the grim,
weekend reality that the owner is facing (for savvy dentists need saturday
wine parties and sunday golfing to keep sane, what with all that peering
into mouths), the entity thinks back to the book he read on asian computer
programmers in college and decides to push for the medal of honor. Of
course, American whiteboy multi-armed beings are no match for this kind of
endless labor and abandoned social life, and things start to go terribly
wrong.
His wife calls him all day, demanding he spend time with the
baby (who, in the absence of it's father, has developed a nasty habit of
multi-thumb sucking), and unwittingly instigates countless arguments
ending in slammed phones and blown floodgates of resent and stress. He
begins to loathe his work; no break, only a coffee here and there, and the
once proud operater slowly descends to something comparable to the
janitor, only with so much more to take care of, it was only a matter of time
before wires started getting crossed. The owner, still pinned to the couch
in the middle of the night, begins to notice that even though he is giving the
proper orders, they are being sent to the wrong departments, and,
worst of all, he's starting to get mixed memos that are crumpled, out of date,
and sometimes illegible under the latte' stains.
Now, this multi-armed spine riding pilot may all just be a theory
(and I stress the word 'may'), but it works well in explaining the
consequences a human being faces when loosing sleep. For instance,
there is a well known and quite remarkable system leading from the
eyes to the realm of visual awareness. Rarely does it lead us astray. We see
a dark space in an all too common hallway, and the eyes are fast to tell the
mind what lies before it. The mind, too, is fast - fast in determining that what
it is seeing is "reality", and not, for example, a giant black ghoul already in
mid-lunge across the ceiling. The reasoning is simple: a dark
hallway is manageable mentally and physically to a reasonable person,
while the presence of a surely sinister flying black ghoul is not. The picture
of why humans need sleep begins to get clearer.
~jeremy
My psychology teacher tried to tell me:
"Nobody knows why we need sleep!"
At the time I didn't really think much of that,
but tonight I'd like to add a comment or two.
Bearded asians in white lab coats may not have much to show
for years of beating insomniacs over the brain with microscopes,
but are there really no observations to be made? Maybe a cracked, throbbing
tooth would have helped them in their research, because as we all know,
searing pain is sleep's annoying little brother that is far too fond of playing tricks in the night.
Some amount of sleep, maybe five to nine hours, is useful every
twenty-four hours or so if one wants to keep certain symptoms at bay. To
the budding insomniac, after that first day with no sweet dreams to reset the clocks,
he has passed from day zero to day one.
Now, assuming he does not regularly run marathons for the
benefit of those riddled with sexual diseases, his whole being should be
bugging him to lay down and switch off, but if that tooth pain is bad
enough, he won't last long before brushing with benzocaine and trating
himself to an agonozing slow-mo of a surprisingly hellish sunrise.
Day one might not be so bad if his will is strong enough. That old
buddy "sense of time" speeds up and slows down, shifty as an old school
rockhead whose never sure of his score. Together with "mental clarity",
the two ever-imporant powers of the mind decide that there are better
fish to fuck and go jaunting happily out the ears, up, up, and into the sky,
dusting the wax from their shoes on the way there. The zombie in
training, camped on the couch and longing for brains, may turn his skull
upwards and in a sobbing tone say, "So long, fellas."
There is one thing guaranteed to be there for an insomniac, that
old can of glue, the television. While he sits there quietly, his glossy eyes
huffing in the intoxicating visuals, he wonders to himself whether tv is a
friend or an enemy.. Unable to decide, he may slightly realize that his
previous thought is not exactly the train he normally takes, but the
concept is quickly derailed entirely and he is once again left to silence.
In a more universal way, tv seems strangely over-symbolic. One
minute the poor guy is watching a show, the next minute he's waiting
through commercials. Interesting, then boring. Logical, then confusing. The
nature of percieved reality gets to be so random, he stops expecting any
consistency at all and just lets the flow of things drag him like a child's rAg
Doll. For a minute, there is a peculiar sensation of his limbs drifting away,
but when he reaches to put them back into place and finds them seemingly
where they were, he can rest assured that they are still securely
socketed - at least for now.
So he's almost gone forty-eight big ones, and the insomniac's
shifty mood has grown wild from another long, aching day, and the
insatiable desire to somehow fix his tooth with his tongue. He should take
my advice and save himself the insanity of making it all worse.
While he waits for the inevitable coma, spread on a mattress
cracker and staring dead-eyed at the fresh good nature of the 2am back-
to-back Cosby Show, he may be surprised to find that Bill's normally
misleading jabbering at Theo stirs an unexpected laugh from his pulsating
mouth. But the laugh is different, more retarded than usual... And while he
dodges the pain by wondering when he started laughing like that, he may
get lucky and zone out long enough to barely notice night once more
slipping into day, sparing another torturous nightmare of hating the planet
for ever adopting such a ridiculous cycle. Not to mention the ghostly mind
dentists, cackling in their weekend mansions and knowing that ice will
always be solid, and the teeth of young men neglected.
Understanding is best found through experience, or so I like to
believe. Once he's made it into the new day, it becomes clear that rest
allows the body and mind to regroup themselves in order to avoid total
collapse. Muscles and bones, organ fueling nutrients, cancer defying
vitamins and layers of well defined fatty tissue are drafted in the war on
physical decay. His attitude begins to reflect the condition of the mind,
which starves for all it's favorite neurotransmitters and grows more pissed
off that it has spent so long playing endless hours of mind over matter (a
game that gets old very quickly) without so much as an hour break to
watch dreamy naughty nurse videos spliced with intense, emotional
scenarios of falling from some tall structure, only to get one foot from the
field and hand the ball off to body #18, who, having been looking the
other way all along can do nothing better than shudder violently and give
a sheepish, confused look to the team.
Without his normal method of keeping track of it, time slides
around him like an eel, slithering along the furthest reaches of his mind
and turning over the crates of order that he has spent so long stacking.
Imagine, for a moment, that the most direct functions of his
being are being operated by some multi-armed entity that sits on his
spine, perched in front of a relatively complicated set of switch boards.
Every time the young man would sleep, that entity would trade places with
the janitor, who knows just enough about the job to keep the big calls
flowing and who is more than happy to catch a buzz off the diluted sense
of respect that such work allows. With the office in capable (enough)
hands, the entity heads home to some undisclosed north pole wonderland
to his multi-armed family. These are normal conditions, all is well.
When one doesn't sleep because there's bells and alarms
wailing away over a block of busted up calcium, that diligent, multi-armed
fool is just too dedicated (or too stupid) to drop the wires and run away
altogether. Instead, he tries to wait things out, hoping the boss is making
an effort to get things under control. With no understanding of the grim,
weekend reality that the owner is facing (for savvy dentists need saturday
wine parties and sunday golfing to keep sane, what with all that peering
into mouths), the entity thinks back to the book he read on asian computer
programmers in college and decides to push for the medal of honor. Of
course, American whiteboy multi-armed beings are no match for this kind of
endless labor and abandoned social life, and things start to go terribly
wrong.
His wife calls him all day, demanding he spend time with the
baby (who, in the absence of it's father, has developed a nasty habit of
multi-thumb sucking), and unwittingly instigates countless arguments
ending in slammed phones and blown floodgates of resent and stress. He
begins to loathe his work; no break, only a coffee here and there, and the
once proud operater slowly descends to something comparable to the
janitor, only with so much more to take care of, it was only a matter of time
before wires started getting crossed. The owner, still pinned to the couch
in the middle of the night, begins to notice that even though he is giving the
proper orders, they are being sent to the wrong departments, and,
worst of all, he's starting to get mixed memos that are crumpled, out of date,
and sometimes illegible under the latte' stains.
Now, this multi-armed spine riding pilot may all just be a theory
(and I stress the word 'may'), but it works well in explaining the
consequences a human being faces when loosing sleep. For instance,
there is a well known and quite remarkable system leading from the
eyes to the realm of visual awareness. Rarely does it lead us astray. We see
a dark space in an all too common hallway, and the eyes are fast to tell the
mind what lies before it. The mind, too, is fast - fast in determining that what
it is seeing is "reality", and not, for example, a giant black ghoul already in
mid-lunge across the ceiling. The reasoning is simple: a dark
hallway is manageable mentally and physically to a reasonable person,
while the presence of a surely sinister flying black ghoul is not. The picture
of why humans need sleep begins to get clearer.
~jeremy
