Sleepless...

It is late. Too late. much, much too late. 

my perfect time.

Us night owls are an odd bunch. I think my night owl nature might stem from my deeply ingrained tendency to procrastinate. I put off going to bed at night, and I put off getting up in the morning. Invariably this causes sleep deprivation, which, if pushed, can yield a somewhat hallucinatory state.

For an insomniac, everything is a hallucination. Nothing's quite real. There's something about the rhythm of sleeping, waking, sleeping, and waking, that gives one a sense of the linearity of TIME. When you don't sleep, the rhythm is lost. And soon, all sense of meaning of TIME is lost. The ancients thought in terms of cycles. The sun rises and sets. So does the moon. The tides go in and out. The seasons repeat in sequence.

Man sleeps. Wakes. Then sleeps again, then wakes again.

The state of mind, or rather the state of 'perception', induced by the onset of prolonged insomnia is similar to that induced by opiates. The hard edges of the world are softened. Everything...recedes. An uneasy euphoria settles like a grey mist, enveloping the world, blurring what once appeared to be clear cut boundaries between self and other, form and emptiness. The mind...slows.

The world becomes a dream where nothing is real and nothing matters, insofar as everything is real and everything matters. Paradoxes are commonplace and taken for granted. Contradiction infuses everything...no problems.

Then the second wind blows in. The body's desperate attempt to stay alive, to keep functioning by opening the adrenaline floodgates. 

But in TIME, The body declares war on the opiate. And at last,

we succumb.

and drift back into the ancient rhythm of movement between worlds. The world behind closed eyes, behind thought, behind perception. And then,

WAKE