There was a night last week that I didn’t sleep. At least, I don’t think I did. From 3am to 6:45am, I lay in bed staring at the back of my eyelids but fully aware of every one of my son’s nighttime whines and every whoosh of wind against the windows behind me. My level of tired was barely edged out by my level of restlessness, as I kept thinking about my day as a zombie that lie ahead. If I shut down completely, I may not wake up until well after the start of my shift. There was a little comfort in the fact that at least I was in bed (or on the couch rather), and even though my brain was working graveyard, at least my body wasn’t.
But there I was; me, a little white noise, and whole lot of thought. Dialog mostly. The left side of my head was 40-something year old Caucasian woman with a raspy voice. I didn’t see her face, but I could tell she had a nappy head of gray hair based on the way she sounded. She was an elementary school teacher, and you could tell that she really wanted to have an intelligent conversation with 19-20 year old version of me on the right side, but she had been programed to talk to everyone as if they were a child. I humored her for about a REM cycle, but I had to move on when I realized that half of my inner monologue had been female. Not that I’m sexist, it just kind of freaked me out a bit.
Then more thoughts about work. I was the 4th person in. The other three were the same person (who will go unnamed). It was them, but my “logic” kept having to remind itself that this was not possible, so it assumed that the other two were her cousins… and all of which were evil. Now this is one of the few points of the night that the visuals were crystal clear. Still in the very dim light of my inner eyelid, the three identical faces slowly morphed into their true, demonic form. Each was different, but none less grotesque than the next. Teeth grew long and sharp, hairlines receeded sideways behind the ears, the one in the front grew some weird zebra/tirger-striped sideburns. And the changes were continuous. It didn’t just stop, their faces kept getting more horrific by the second. I knew I could open my eyes at any moment and the visual would come to an abrupt halt, but really wanted to see where this was going. Unfortunately, my mind was moving far too fast for me to dictate what happened next, so everything went dark once again.
….
….
I wasn’t sure if time was standing still or moving extremely fast. I’d try to open my eye to take a glance at the Comcast box but all I could see was an orange LED blur, not sure if it was a 3 or a 5. But I was about 89% sure that I wasn’t asleep. Even though I didn’t trust it, my mind had its own way of telling time. Pulsating constantly, but at varying rates of speed. Some simultaneously, some not even felt, but rather seen as flashes of slightly lighter shades of gray in the inner lining of my forehead. I’m not sure if it was my heartbeat, or my eyeballs twitching, a combination of both. Or perhaps none of the above, but it was fucking awesome. Every thought that ran though my head was fascinating but incomplete, resetting itself after every tick. Everything was in gray-scale. Waves became checkers, checkers became waves. Solids shapes became liquid, or what I’d imagine liquid to be at its most molecular level. It was like someone was trying to put the intersect in my head with an old black and white TV and no pictures (Chuck reference). At this point, I knew I was halfway there, the thin sheet of tissue paper that separated the conscious from the subconscious. And I tread across the fragile surface for the rest of my unsleep in complete satisfaction with what transpired in the wee hours of the morning.
Dawn broke, and shades of blue made way through the angles of the vertical blinds. I knew it was time to go. It wasn’t too hard to peel myself off the sheets because, after all, I hadn’t really fallen asleep to begin with. And there started my day. I may have dozed off a few times after the 5-hour Energy wore thin, but each was a reminder of an amazing trip to the halfway between I hope to go again… that last line might have been a little too poetic.
