Substance-Induced Insomnia

Well, I had another sleepless night last night, but this time it was due to neither high winds, nor mini mania (Part I, II), nor fixed-gear fantasies. Nope, this time the culprit was something entirely new: experimentation with pyschoactive substances. After living in a college town like Boulder where practically everyone does it, I figured that I should try it too...

Yup, I've started drinking coffee (haha, did I trick you?). Being the novice coffee drinker I am though, I drank too much coffee too late last night and when I was finished with my work and came home to go to sleep, I was just too hopped-up on caffeine to sleep (that reminds me, cafeí­na - "caffeine" would be an excellent subsitution in the Gasolina o Quesadilla? song...).

Last time I wrote about having a sleepless night my dad commented that when I can't sleep I should just accept and embrace the insomnia and get up and do something while I'm feeling awake. I pondered this, but then I realized that regardless of whether I can get to sleep or not, I still have to wake up at the same time in the morning, so I should just stay in bed and keep trying to fall asleep on the off chance that it works. And actually, even though I failed at that, I still managed to get just as much accomplished laying there in bed pretending to sleep as I would have had I gotten up and tried to do some homework or something. As I was laying there, I thought up at least 5 or 6 blog posts worth of material, which means I have potentially saved myself several hours over the coming days and weeks of agonizing blog-planning time. Actually, that's not true because I will probably keep thinking of new things that I want to write about, so really I am just at a deficit now and I will have to write extra in order to keep the topics from piling up too high. So really I've just made MORE work for myself?!

I think about blog topics fairly often as I'm dozing off, but I often forget about them by the morning because I don't want to get out of bed and write anything down because it might disrupt my train of thought (that and I'm also usually tired and lazy and comfortable in bed). But last night I actually wrote stuff down so I won't forget it...

After several hours of laying in bed mentally planning out my next several blog entries (I last looked at the clock at 2:30, and I'm sure I was still awake for at least another half an hour or so...), I finally began to arrive at the final laps of the mind-race. I got this strange spacial sensation that I have always gotten from time to time for pretty much as long as I can remember; I wonder if anyone else has ever had this sort of sensation. It happens when I am somewhere around probably 60% consciousness and my body becomes really relaxed. It becomes relaxed to the point where I almost can't even feel it. Then I get this strange feeling that I am just a head, no body, and I have become very small and I am in the corner of a very large room on the floor where it meets the wall. But I can still kind of feel my limbs, and I can also still hear and listen to the real room that I am actually sleeping in, which still sounds like a normal sized room. Theses two conflicting sensations almost seem to combine to where the overall sensation is an illogical feeling of being a tiny, bodiless head that is at once both lost in, and filling up the huge room with my body. It is a really neat sensation. After laying there for a few minutes I start to become aware of how I can't really feel my body and it makes me want to move, twitch my arm, stretch my leg, just to feel that it's still there, but at the same time I want to resist the temptation to move because when I move it immediately interrupts this whole sensation even if only for a moment.

Anyway, today's video is "Risingson" by one of my all-time favorite musical groups, Massive Attack. I haven't been listening to them as much lately though because I have instead been listening almost exclusively to Muse (at least I resisted the temptation to put up another Muse video though...). Their CD Mezzanine was the only thing I listened to all day, everyday for pretty much the entire summer of 2000 while I was working at AGENCY.COM coding HTML. I chose this video because even though it's a pretty boring video, I think the song makes a pretty good soundtrack to insomnia.