squirmelia | Sleeping: The Prelude to Reality

Reality is bursting with dreams.

At first I wondered if it was because I wasn't getting enough sleep - my life had changed and become more impregnated with responsibility. It demanded I slept at regular times and not just when I felt like it, and this seemed almost impossible to adjust to. Most people have experienced insomnia to some level - whether it has just been not being able to sleep at exactly the same time you usually do night after night, or decades of insomnia. The act of not sleeping is familiar to us all. The night fades, our eyelids try to grab the tiny fragments of darkness they so much desire, but sometimes they just don't manage it, sleep is beyond our reach.

Maybe you have friends who claim to have not slept for weeks, but the world record for naturally staying awake apparently doesn't extend to even a month. Your lack of sleeping is probably sufficiently less. Sleep less, live longer, they tell us, trying to advocate sleep deprivation, so that we may not know what is going on any longer. Our reality becomes submerged with jitters and objects moving in ways they didn't before.

You haven’t been sleeping, possibly awake due to brief fluctuations of caffeine - some Diet Coke, or maybe a coffee so weak in flavour it must have emerged from a vending machine. Or even some imported caffeinated gum that you fold over your tongue that a friend brought back from their holiday for you. They knew that was the kind of souvenir you'd like, chewy at first and then slimy, imparting caffeine to the back of your mouth and into your brain drenched in saliva. You probably avoid the caffeinated water and possibly the caffeine tablets, because you assume that you don't need the caffeine quite that much. You might become addicted, you might shake permanently.

You go into a newsagent, and you stand by the magazines, swaying slightly. The bright colours and over-emphasised text jumps out at you, mockingly and you just can't decide which magazine to look at, since they all look somehow exciting, dancing, jigging about. You stand there dazed and don't actually open any of them because you're afraid what you will see if the articles, which have suddenly taken on a far larger degree of importance, are closer to your eyes. You wonder if tiny little orang-utans will swarm from the article about the nutrition values of banana milkshake. You realise you can't handle being in the shop anymore and try to find somewhere darker, somewhere that you can be close to the ground and hide. Even then tiny vessels of light will stream through the cracks and make you feel giddy.

Sleep deprivation and the over-indulgence of caffeine are not the only things that can change your perception. It's a constantly changing thing, and just when you think you are perceiving something constantly, have grasped its delicate intricacies, that it becomes not how you thought at all. Take smell, for example. You have a tub of strongly smelling lip balm. Cherry flavour. You like the smell of it so much that you open it and sniff it, even though your lips are already glistening and soft. After a while, you can barely smell it, and you think the flavour has been lost. It's just that you've smelt it so much that your mind has got so used to it and probably wonders why the smell isn’t present for every second of the day.

You think you have some kind of selective agnosia, and that you'll probably lose your sense of smell completely within days. You think about all those beautiful smells you will miss - coffee, the smell of the air when it is about to snow, strawberry fields, gingerbread men, the smell of your lover. You wonder if you lose your ability to smell, your other senses will improve to compensate. Ultra-sensitive hearing, x-ray vision, being able to tell if there is even one grain of nutmeg in your food. Suddenly agnosia doesn't seem so bad, but you don't use the cherry lip balm again anyway.

At other times, you can sleep, you always sleep, and there's nothing else apart from sleep that consumes you. Not really anyway. The sleep takes on a permanent twang that makes you want to be part of it, and you don't even remember that insomnia existed. You're not sure which you'd rather have: You're always tired either way.