Being Tired is a Funny Thing.
Especially when you're not tired anymore. I mean, your body's tired, and if you were to lie down you wouldn't come up for 17 hours (as it happened), but when you're walking up and down stairs and answering phones and doing work, you're attentive and focused.
Sometimes. Sometimes, of course, after sitting for a minute perhaps, you're trying to keep your eyes open - and trying to remember what you're doing - and (as it happened) so intent on getting through the night and making sure that everything gets done that you start mixing car horns in with dialogue and wonder why their levels are so different.
Or when you've only slept a few hours, and the alarm goes off, and you twist in bed to look at the clock and see the red numbers and wonder - what are those lights? Ah, they make numbers, if only you could focus your eyes - but do they mean anything? Ah, yes, of course, they mean time.
What is Time?
And you're completely befuddled, lying there with the glimmering red doubling itself in your vision, trying to decide whether Time is something that you need to think more about, and what numbers have to do with Time, and what any of it has to do with making plans, and whether you should make a plan to get out of bed, and if so, when.
All the dots that our minds connect come untethered and when you're tired. The concept of numbers bobs just out of reach of the idea of Time, and just beyond that is the idea that perhaps, what time it is may influence what actions one should take.
The dream-state, as we all know, can do that - can color one's perceptions so that the world as it is becomes, instead, the world as it seems to be, viewed through a clouded glass. And then you sit up, and put your feet on the floor, and as my mom would say 'move from horizontal to vertical', and you wipe the fog from your mind and the world aligns itself back into place, clicking firmly at the seams.
But when you're tired, those seams don't match perfectly, and wind whistles through like your car window on the freeway. And the adrenaline that would normally pump you into overdrive becomes the only thing keeping you from collapsing on the floor, and the whole thing feels not so much like you're on drugs, but like you've just come off drugs, or you're past the buzz-drunk and into the throb-drunk, and you get all that fun out-of-it-ness without all the fun.
You've always guessed that sleep deprivation would be a good torture, when you've read about it at POW camps or whatever, but at Day 4 or 5 you understand it intimately.
And the worst part - the absolute worst - isn't so much not going to sleep, but going to sleep and waking up too soon. Your body needs, now, 20 hours to catch back up to normal. You give it two and a half. Ouch.
Here's something I never noticed, pulling all-nighters at school and such, until I didn't get a good night's sleep (more than 3, 4, 5 hrs) for over a week - it messes up your digestion. I could deal with the nodding off or the fatigue hallucinations - but the cramping stomachaches were just debilitating.
Sometimes. Sometimes, of course, after sitting for a minute perhaps, you're trying to keep your eyes open - and trying to remember what you're doing - and (as it happened) so intent on getting through the night and making sure that everything gets done that you start mixing car horns in with dialogue and wonder why their levels are so different.
Or when you've only slept a few hours, and the alarm goes off, and you twist in bed to look at the clock and see the red numbers and wonder - what are those lights? Ah, they make numbers, if only you could focus your eyes - but do they mean anything? Ah, yes, of course, they mean time.
What is Time?
And you're completely befuddled, lying there with the glimmering red doubling itself in your vision, trying to decide whether Time is something that you need to think more about, and what numbers have to do with Time, and what any of it has to do with making plans, and whether you should make a plan to get out of bed, and if so, when.
All the dots that our minds connect come untethered and when you're tired. The concept of numbers bobs just out of reach of the idea of Time, and just beyond that is the idea that perhaps, what time it is may influence what actions one should take.
The dream-state, as we all know, can do that - can color one's perceptions so that the world as it is becomes, instead, the world as it seems to be, viewed through a clouded glass. And then you sit up, and put your feet on the floor, and as my mom would say 'move from horizontal to vertical', and you wipe the fog from your mind and the world aligns itself back into place, clicking firmly at the seams.
But when you're tired, those seams don't match perfectly, and wind whistles through like your car window on the freeway. And the adrenaline that would normally pump you into overdrive becomes the only thing keeping you from collapsing on the floor, and the whole thing feels not so much like you're on drugs, but like you've just come off drugs, or you're past the buzz-drunk and into the throb-drunk, and you get all that fun out-of-it-ness without all the fun.
You've always guessed that sleep deprivation would be a good torture, when you've read about it at POW camps or whatever, but at Day 4 or 5 you understand it intimately.
And the worst part - the absolute worst - isn't so much not going to sleep, but going to sleep and waking up too soon. Your body needs, now, 20 hours to catch back up to normal. You give it two and a half. Ouch.
Here's something I never noticed, pulling all-nighters at school and such, until I didn't get a good night's sleep (more than 3, 4, 5 hrs) for over a week - it messes up your digestion. I could deal with the nodding off or the fatigue hallucinations - but the cramping stomachaches were just debilitating.
