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   Wednesday, June 18, 2008  
AUTHENTICITY : INSOMNIA

Sigh. This just happens sometimes, now way less frequently than before. I can't sleep. I just can't get my mind / body / brain to shut down and STOP for a little while. And of course it never "stops," really, but rather I am having great difficulty turning off the centers of my brain that we associate with waking states and turning it over to a sleeping state. (I could go into a long discussion about the reticular activating system and threshold levels of concentrations of particular neurochemicals, but that would require more Latin than I have the capacity for at this hour.)

How long have you been awake? they would ask.

I don't know, I'd say, What day is it?

This was actually my job for the better part of two years, i.e. that of the pharmaceutical prostitute. (Thanks Myo for the very fitting term!) I had insomnia -- severe insomnia -- and though the sleep disorder clinics couldn't fix this disorder, they were able to make me into a particularly useful (and well paid) guinea pig. Drug testing was my sole source of income for about two years. Granted, it wasn't much -- by anyone else's standards not nearly enough to live on, but I had some financial support from my family and there was *no way* I was keeping a conventional job at that point in my life. Think about it -- it is very hard to keep down steady employment when one goes through periodic bouts of not sleeping for four or five days on end. I was very thrifty (1000 uses for Ramen noodles! None of which involve insane amounts of sodium!!! 100 tea bags for the price of one 2-liter bottle of pop -- that's right, 100 BAGS!!!! Government cheese? It melts great -- slap some on those Raman noodles! And maybe a little of that Taco Bell hot sauce. One $0.49 taco = 40 packets of relatively legitimate hot sauce! IGA bread: $0.33 Kroger bread: $0.25 = it's worth the extra two mile walk! These are prices from the late '80s and early '90s but still -- I was thrifty.

Plus, I refused to be a Cube Monkey. Nope. No way. And I wasn't touching that greasy food either, or being called "Sweetheart," or getting anybody's coffee. ("No thanks, I've already got some," was my answer to "Hey Sweetheart -- how 'bout some coffee?" Much laughter ensued. I was very competent (despite my nightly drinking problem -- I really hated my cage -- I mean cube) though not very well-liked after that by the President of the company.) I would rather play in the snow all night then EVER go back to that job again. Nope. Won't do it. Thus I learned to live on Ramen.

Where was I? Oh yes -- insomnia.

You can see where this becomes an issue -- I have A LOT going on in my mind, pretty much all the time. (So does everyone -- I've just spent thirty years teaching myself to be attuned to all of it at once… which is a lot.) When I am "overly tired" as the saying goes, I can't shut this off. Normally, I can go into a deep meditative state and let go of ALL my discursive thoughts, but when I am too tired, I get scattered -- it all goes in all directions all at once and it's all full of words. (Words: my gift and my curse.) Which, granted, can really fun. (I make all my own recreational chemicals, right here in my brain, thus I have no desire to ingest them from external sources.) But sometimes, I want off the ride. Help!!!!!!! Isn't there a tent I can go to where some nice hippie will talk me down??!!?? I want off the ride!!!!!!!!

There were times in the past when my insomnia was a lot more prevalent -- it was more on than off. These days a bout of it is very rare -- maybe twice a year -- four times at most. Now is one of those times.

The last time I really slept (as in experienced one entire approximately 90 minute sleep cycle) was Saturday night; it is now Wednesday morning. In that time I have slept about three hours total, and not in a row. I am sure that I am quite tired. However, the systems in my brain that register those chemicals have other chemicals bounded to their receptors right now, thus I am unable to "receive" the chemicals that tell me to go to sleep, thus I am experiencing life as though I am awake.

I say "as though I am awake," because some of my systems *are* experiencing life as though I was asleep. (No, it is not really safe for me to drive right now, thanks for asking.) I am having mild auditory hallucinations, mostly just creatively combining atmospheric noise into other potential combinations. (In our typical waking mind, we usually experience sounds as discreet, picking out particular sounds as originating from a particular object, and experience that sound as evidence of that object's existence. ((We are *so* about identifying objects as homo sapiens -- it is one of our greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses as a species.)) In other states of mind ((i.e. when other parts of the brain are activated and others are quiescent)) we experience sound for its own sake, as sound itself, rather than just the indicator of some other object.) I am not, as I have been at other times, running around the house with a pink metal colander on my head yelling about the Phillip Glass Doom Machine hovering outside my house. Nope, that was someone else.

This can be fun IF I don't have anything "important" that I really have to do. Unfortunately, this often strikes exactly WHEN I have something really important to do -- like now. I have *so much* to do this week, to do tomorrow, and sleep would be REALLY BENEFICIAL to all of those undertakings. (To give you a hint, check out the time and then remember that my alarm clock is set for 7:00 a.m….. and that I haven't had a full sleep cycle since Saturday night…. and that I *must* function tomorrow, and that I *will* function tomorrow.) It blows me away sometimes to remember that some other people (most?) can't "control" their feeling of tired the way that I can. I can off-handedly discuss this level of exhaustion as though I were talking about the color of my socks. (Um, I'm a hammer.) Of course, then I sometimes say things like that, totally out of the blue. But I could stay awake for three more days if I had to, or even if I just had a mind to.

Oh -- then there's the drugs. Drugs are bad, um'kay?

Other than the times that somebody was willing to pay me thousands of dollars to take them, I've always pretty much refused drugs to reduce my insomnia. As it was such a chronic condition, I *was not* okay making that kind of relationship commitment with a chemical. (I've got plenty of my own chemicals, thank you. I don't like to mix my cocktails.) On occasion, rare occasion, I would take something "over the counter" to help me sleep -- an actual pharmaceutical drug.

Note: I am okay taking some of the natural remedies, and I have several that typically help quite a bit to "keep me regular." Liquid melatonin helps a lot (much of my inability to sleep stems from having trained my body / brain for so long not to produce melatonin and/or not to "receive" those electro-chemical messages if they were present) as does this crappy tasting (but effective!) valerian tea. (A very particular brand is all that I use -- there are only two brands I've found effective.) I also sometimes take tryptophan (I love Canada!) or a supplement called Orchex (an anti-anxiety supplement for my hyper-thinking head -- it's not anxiety, but it races just as fast) or kava kava. Sometimes I'll even have a shot glass full (read: about an ounce and a half) of organic Australian red wine. I usually take one or two of these things at a time, and tend to rotate depending upon what it is that is keeping me awake on any particular day, and many days I don't take anything.

But some days… some days none of this will cut it so I take half the adult dose of an over the counter sleeping pill. Last week, as whatever this current chemical cycle is began, I took a sleeping pill one night, really needing sleep. The next day I was so groggy I ended up taking a nap. Well, if I take a nap there is *no way* I'm going to be able to sleep that night, even if the nap is at one in the afternoon and it is the only sleep I've had in twenty-four hours. Nope, I'm all done for that day.

Unless I would take a sleeping pill to knock me out, which I did, not wanting to endure a sleepless night where I would have to function (and parent) the next day. Ditto on that day, and the next, and the next. It was a vicious cycle, which led to me being more and more vicious my self. Every day I was little more impatient, a little crankier, a little foggier, a little more unfocused. After about five days I said -- holy crap! This has got to stop.

And so it did. And here I am. REBOUND!!!!!!

I was once on a drug for six weeks (for money) -- it was intense. Every night, if you could fight the incredible drag toward sleep and stay awake, you would hallucinate. That in and of itself isn't all that remarkable -- an insomniac knows that you will hallucinate after about sixty hours awake anyway. (And that is with NO sleep at all in that time -- your system processes chemicals very quickly as soon as you lose consciousness, so it doesn't have time to "build up" enough for true hallucinations, rapid eye movement with your eyes open sort of stuff.) The remarkable thing was that you would hallucinate the SAME THING every night, and that thing was ENVIRONMENTALLY DEPEDENT, meaning you would see the same thing in the same place every time. And that wasn't all -- just as a further experiment (it's in the name of science!!!!) I had a friend of mine, a fellow severe insomniac, try taking one one night, as I knew that he would be able to fight through the urge to sleep. (A normal person could not -- I experimented.) I didn't tell him anything about my experience, only that it was "interesting" and I wanted to hear what he thought of it.

Here's the kicker: He saw exactly the same "hallucinations" that I did in exactly the same places at exactly the same time. Now, one could say that I "saw" these things because he was telling me about them out loud -- the power of suggestion and all -- but he was telling me about things I'd been watching (and journaling about) every night for the past three weeks. Coincidence? I think not. (Though, statistically speaking, there is *some* possibility that this was random, the dual experience of seeing a very short person running up and down the hallway repeatedly is unlikely. Oh my gawd! he screamed. There's a midget running around in your hallway! Yep, sure is. And those two folks in the corner go through that same series of gestures over and over, seeming to have the same argument every night.)

Anyway. Interesting as that drug was, after six weeks, the study was up. It was actually a very effective sleep aid (once I decided to go to sleep) with no hangover in the morning, no disruption (that I could tell) of REM states, etc.. (These are some of the many reasons I refuse on-going drug therapy.) However, the rebound from it was *terrible*.

For a like amount of time that I ingested the drug, i.e. six weeks, I had INCREDIBLE insomnia, as in I would sleep about twenty minutes every four or five days, and then not again for another three to five days, etc.. This went on for six weeks, nonstop. I could not function. I lost my job. I dropped out of school. I hid under my table because I was afraid that the trains in the train yard three miles away were creeping closer and closer to my house. (This was in the days before I'd acclimated to and really understood the nature of auditory hallucinations. And I'd like to note that the drug company sent no nice hippie to talk me down and explain all this -- I had to become my own hippie.)

And while the drug company offered little in the way of compensation for the disruption of my life (not that I cared a whole lot -- it was just another interesting and unique experience) it was able to offer me sporadic ongoing employment freaking out drug company executives for $100 an hour.

They loved to call me, their one Really Freaky Test Subject Outlier -- if a drug could put me to sleep, it could put *anyone* to sleep. At the same time, perhaps they wanted to put a "human face" on the intense rebound effect that this drug had. I would come in, all strung out, barely able to take off my sunglasses, even indoors, because my eyes were so light sensitive. I was in a head-space waaaaaay beyond social conventions -- I didn't care how I sat in the chair, what I said, what I wore, or what I smelled like. I didn't now where I was, how I'd gotten there (I drove!!!!), who these people were or what day it was. How long have I been awake? I don't f'ing know -- what's Monkey to the power of 10? Riddle me that Batman.

And then I'd laugh.

They were really so funny there in their Armani suits with their serious faces, two hundred dollar pens scrawling across legal pads, writing down *something* based on the gibberish I was spewing -- who wouldn't laugh in that context?

Mostly I was coherent -- What do you do all night when you're not sleeping? Do you watch a lot of television? I don't own a television, so no. I never watch it. (gasp! That was nearly as deviant as my sleeping habits.) So what do you DO? they wanted to know. I don't know -- meditate, talk to people, try to levitate, draw, write stuff, read books, stand on top of bar stools and rant about the social and environmental dangers of Rice-A-Roni to passers by on the sidewalk -- you know -- the stuff everyone does. [scribble scribble scribble] Can I have my money now? I wanna go buy an armadillo.

I finally ended my career as a pharmaceutical prostitute when I was given a drug that was some kind of anti-depressant. (Given the time, it could have been Prozac in its human trial phase. We were never told the name of the drug we could potentially get, only the class of drug. It was also just as likely that we would be in the control group and get a "blank" pill. Those studies were easier but not as exciting.) From a neurochemical perspective I am not depressed. (I'm actually "anti-depressed." The very same chemical imbalance that brings me insomnia also makes depression chemically impossible for me.) The first night I took it, the walls started to bleed about fifteen minutes later. Not cool. The second night, they started to bleed even more profusely. Even uncooler. The third night it was so bad that I really freaked out. (Again, I didn't understand the basis for hallucinations and chemical reactions, so it was very difficult for me to stay in a calm, objective state of mind like I could now -- and again -- no nice hippie was sent to talk me down.) After I was retrieved from where I was, standing in the middle of the street screaming (at a garbage can, I think) I decided to drop out of the study. No amount of money was worth that level of "experimental."

That was the last one I ever did. From what I hear, pharmaceutical prostitutes are not as well paid (nor considered as socially prestigious [guffaw]) as they once were. (Note: there was a one and only time that I did participate again in one, but it wasn't for sleep. There was a study to test a new yeast infection medication -- it wasn't even a new medication but rather a different "one time dosage" trial of an already existing medication. I wanted Christmas money so I willed myself to get a yeast infection (I've had exactly two in my life -- one after a round of antibiotics when I was very young, and this one, so again -- I doubt that this was random) so that I could participate in the study. That was my second measurably successful "mind over matter" experiment, the first one being learning to will my diaphragm from spasming when I have the hiccups. (Which is very useful -- I find hiccups unpleasant.) )

As you can see, I get very (parenthetical) when I can't sleep -- I actually often think and write like this -- it just "bleeds over" into what I categorize as my "normal" writing a bit more when I'm tired. And what is normal anyway? This is authenticity.

And insomnia. I think I will say a-do, trying again for some shut-eye, as popeye would call it. I am not *strictly obligated* to be anywhere until noon, and though I planned to get up at seven, I think that it is more important to break this cycle. Believe it or not, if I stay up it (as we can see) WILL NOT ensure that I would be able to sleep EVEN MORE easily the next night. For me, during these times, there is very little correlation between being exhausted and sleep -- very little correlation at all.

But I will try. I've downed two cups of valerian tea and had my shot of liquid melatonin a while back. I know that I am upsetting my serotonin levels by doing this, i.e. sitting in front of a computer, but sometimes, if I let my words (some of them -- I'm also thinking about six dozen other things right now) do something in the concrete, they will stop pestering me in the abstract.

Wish me luck….and some sleep.
   posted by fMom at 4:48 AM



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