This is your life...

...and it's ending, one minute at a time.
My muse has returned. And before you start assuming it's some girl, why don't you page back a while and think. Lately, I haven't talked about sleep problems, have I? I've been sleeping fairly well, actually. But now, she's back. My muse. My insomnia.

The funny thing about insomnia is the sunrises. No matter how many of them I see, they always seem sureal, if I haven't gotten a good coat of sleep gunk under my eyes. There is something unnatural about watching the sun rise, set, and rise again without any sleep. The body rebels, it aches, creaks and groans like a spainish galleon. The mind burns, neurons firing like a mexican justice squad. Bad metaphors and nonsensical journalistic tangents follow. It's a trip.

People think they yawn because they're tired.
When you yawn, you exhale deeply, which causes subsequent breathes to be deeper, as well as stimulating your heart. This forces greater quantities of oxygen into your brain, giving it a bit of extra pep. Your brain is a junkie, and oxygen is it's H. It's needs it, baby, needs it. So when you're tired, you yawn because your brain is starved for oxygen. And it'll either get it from rest, or from making you yawn.

When you don't sleep, the brain is slowly deprived of oxygen. In addition to the pschological aspects of not sleeping, the oxygen depravation makes for an impressive floorshow. If you go outside, in public, people seem strange to you. More hostile, maybe. Or just plan uglier. It's hard to say. But everybody offends.

After a day, you feel like your eyes are on fire. Maybe you get splitting headaches that make you feel like ACUTALLY splitting your head open would be a nice respite.

Headaches can also be cause by lack of bloodflow, and thereby oxygen, into the sinus cavities.

Around day two, your eyes feel like they could shoot laser beams, if only you knew the right nerve to stretch. You're also constantly flopping between hungry, and sick to your stomach. Your body is burning fuel at a breakneck pace, at this point, to keep up with your constant activity. If you kept this up long enough, you'd look like Kate Moss's exoskelton.

On day three, you're pretty much locked in a state of delerium. Your brain is jonesing for it's REM sleep fix, and like a new born crack junkie, it cries out. And when it cries, it leaves you in a state I can only describe as "woogy". Nothing seems real. Or it seems too real. Like you're watching some dumbfuck art student film, and the director keeps changing lenses on you. It's similar, in way, to being drunk, in that reality bends slightly at the edges, but not in a terribly noticable way, unless you know what to look for. The cartoons make it easy to see when your drunk. Probably why so many kids in illinois kill themselves in high school. Oh well. More chlorine in the gene pool.

Your senses are at once hightened, and lowered. Your tactile sensations are through the roof. You can feel everything. You'd sooner eat a lightbulb than put on a wool sweater. Aside from sexual organs, and maybe your tounge, your fingertips are your most sensative area. Tocch a square of sandpaper to your arm, no big deal. Use your fingertip? Goosebums. On day three, your entire body feels as sensative as they are. In addition, your eyes and ears feel hightened. Like you just got new perscription glasses from god. You see more detail than ever before. But are you really seeing more? No. You're just noticing more. Those details? The lines in the floor, the walls, the slight color differences, the shapes, they were always there. If you go back later and look, you might see them still. If you can remember. You were just too busy to notice the little details before.

On day 4, you start making up your own details. Having not slept a wink for four days, reality goes the way of a Salvador Dali painting. Mind you, that's not what you see. But that's what it FEELS like. Like the whole world is melting. Events, people, places, all run together into a weird reality soup. Hallucinations are not to be totally unexpected. At this point, your brain has decided to try to put together it's own meth, using your brain as a hot plate. It catches little hits of REM sleep when it thinks you won't notice. When you let your gaurd down for a minute. When you're driving.

Sometimes, if you're doing something you've done often, you're brain will go on to auto pilot. I once caught three hours of sleep while running a register at a movie theater concession stand. I kept perfect change.

On day five, all bets are off. With the combination of bad brain chemestry, stress, anxiety, irritability, and just plain hurting, you are Charles Manson, pumped full of adrenachrome and mescaline, itching to go ten rounds with anyone who gets in your way. And especially if it's Jesus with a shotgun. At this point, if there is any decency left in you at all, you will find a way to sleep before you kill someone, or yourself, or both.

On day six, you will probably not be waking up anymore. I read somewhere, once, that a radio DJ tried to stay up a whole week for some dumbass contest. He's a vegatable now. Brain damage. His brain suffocated from the lack of oxygen. It drowned in his own impotent bloodcells.

I've been to day 5. Once. Hopefully, I'll never go back.