The Pros and Cons of Insomnia
Pros:
1. More time for useless, time consuming hobbies. I taught myself how to how to play Fur Elise on guitar at 4:00 am Saturday morning.
2. Sometimes I go for walks around my neighborhood in the early morning hours. Everything is peaceful and quiet. I can pretend that everyone else in town has evacuated due to some impending disaster, leaving me behind to guard against looters.
3. Any restaurant in Baton Rouge that is open at four in the morning is almost guaranteed to have entertaining patrons. It’s like I’m spying on the secret lives of some undiscovered tribe of albino truck drivers, tattooed snack cake delivery men, strippers and bartenders as they practice their exotic and confusing customs. I’m considering making a documentary.
4. All other insomniacs are instantly your friends.
Cons:
1. My doctor gives me a seemingly endless array of medicines that are supposed to make me sleep. Most of these do not have any effect on me. The ones that do work have side effects that are worse than not sleeping at all. I feel like an aspiring drug addict that just can’t decide what to be hooked on.
2. Migraines: Nature’s way of making me rethink my anti-suicide stance.
3. My bed becomes a feared adversary. One pillow is too low, two pillows are too high. My limbs intertwine with the sheets until I feel trapped and I begin to claw at them to free myself. I have literally ripped sheets to shreds in fits of frustration.
4. The horrid stages of sleep deprivation:
Day 1 without sleep: No problems, happens often enough to be simply an annoyance.
Day 2-3 without sleep: Mild panic, decreased physical ability, increased irritability, complete loss of sexual function, loss of appetite, brief hallucinatory events, migraines likely.
Day 4 without sleep: In my experience, this is something of a rebound day. I generally feel somewhat normal. I can’t explain why this happens, but it does.
Day 5 without sleep: The gates of Hell are thrown wide open. Microsleep episodes happen unpredictably, making it unsafe for me to leave home. Fully formed hallucinations, memory loss, migraines guaranteed, inability to process any kind of complicated information, extreme paranoia, heart palpitations.
Day 6 without sleep: This is the longest I have ever gone. Most of the information I have about day 6 had to be given to me by witnesses. Although I was awake enough to have conversations and walk around, I remember almost nothing of the day. I am told that I regressed to an “animal-like state” where I became very agitated and an easily frightened. Apparently I cursed a lot. I was taken to the emergency room where some angelic doctor took pity on me and gave me a sedative that is usually reserved for people about to go into surgery. I slept for 18 hours. When I woke I took a pee that lasted approximately 6 minutes.
All in all, I would much rather sleep like a normal person. Insomnia sucks balls.
2 years ago