The Things You Hear In Elevators
Strangers talk to me all the time. Actually, it's not so much that they talk to me as that they feel somehow emboldened to talk out loud in my presence, almost like I'm invisible. The other day I got in the elevator at work and a woman got on at the next floor. After the doors closed there was the usual moment of silence between strangers in elevators, and then the woman, without ever looking at me, said, "I wonder if I'll get that Ebay package this week."
"It's hard to say," I said, and she looked at me like I'd just had a Tourette's outburst.
Then today I was in the elevator and this guy gets on with me and proceeds to say, "That's some weird shit happening with the moon." It was one o'clock in the afternoon.
"Who knows?" I said. "There's always weird shit happening with the moon."
"Not like this," he said.
The guy got off on my floor and followed me into the City Pages offices. As I held the door for him he said, "You here to try to get a date?" I had no idea what he was talking about and shrugged. "I figure it's worth a try," he said. It took me a couple hours to realize that he was talking about placing a personal ad.
Notes on Insomnia
I've never been able to sleep in any kind of a normal way. I've tried all sorts of things over the years, but nothing much has worked, or worked for long. At this point I've pretty much made my peace with insomnia, and have developed a comfortable and productive set of nocturnal routines for slogging through the long hours after midnight. One thing I've been doing for a long time is researching the rich history of sleeplessness, poring over old case studies, biographies, and literary explorations of the territory. And it really is a territory all its own, encompassing everything from the mysteries of sleep to the strange and largely unexplored landscape of night anywhere on earth. Anybody who has ever wandered around a big city in the middle of the night knows the liberating feeling of having such a huge territory virtually all to themselves; there's a sense of abandonment on a giant scale, and the smallest details make claims on your attention. At the same time all other actual activity seems suspect, a startling invasion of privacy.
One of the things I intend to do in this ridiculous space is to post frequent additions from the stuff I stumble across or experience in the wee hours, whether it's gleaned from obscure medical sources or from poking around in the city in the middle of the night. If you --whoever you are, and if in fact you even exist-- come across something interesting on the subject, or have some noctural expertise of your own you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you (bzellar@citypages.com)
One of the many hazards of poor sleep hygiene is the unwanted intrusion of hypnagogic spasms in the waking mind. It makes thinking hard, and it makes even basic consciousness difficult.
A Very Troubled Human Being
What if an individual is perceiving a daydream and a series of external sensory inputs at precisely the same time, and has lost the capacity to distinguish one from the other? What happens to his perceptual world? Clearly he will be peopling his universe of awareness with elements that are altogether private, presences generated within which for him will be a genuine part of the real world; these are what he sees, or hears, or is otherwise sensing. And should he then be unable to differentiate these from his everyday perceptions, then indeed he may move into a haunted, nightmarish world, and be a very troubled human being.
--Joseph D. Noshpitz, "Reality Testing: A Neuropsychological Fantasy," in Comprehensive Psychology
Melancholics and Maniacs
Melancholics are not so sleepless as maniacs, yet the want of sleep is often an early and prominent symptom. They do not readily sleep, and if they do, they awake soon to be tormented by the vilest misery that it is possible for human creatures to endure.
--A.W. MacFarlane, M.D., Insomnia and its Therapeutics. 1891
Brain Rest --A Disquisition
Another important hygienic rule for the maintenance of healthy sleep is never to thwart the drowsy impulse...at its approach the individual should invariably betake himself to rest. Nor should he tarry until the drowsiness verges on unconsciousness, but, rather, at the very first intimation of brain weariness, seek to assume a horizontal position as quickly as possible....
If nature's well-timed laws be systematically disregarded, a very long period will not have elapsed before difficulty will be experienced in falling asleep properly. The individual, on retiring, will find, instead of the usually well-marked symptoms of approaching unconsciousness, a tendency to morbid intellection. Extravagant pictures, conjured up from a grotesque panorama which unrolls itself before the mental vision like a species of pictorial cyclone; one impression not succeeding, but rather heaping itself upon those which have gone before, until coherency is swept away upon the tidal wave of hopeless confusion. Such a one tosses to and fro, seeking in vain for some position in which to obtain relief from the persecutions of an irritated and relentless consciousness....Pale and dejected, the following morning finds such a one in the midst of an ominous depression of spirits, which he seeks to relieve by resort to copious libations.
--J. Leonard Corning, M.D., Brain Rest: A Disquisition on the Curative Properties of Prolonged Sleep. 1885
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