Re: It's like a switch has flipped . . .

bugger - ignore this, i wanted to save it as a draft, but instead i pressed the 'send' button : )

It's not finished. And i'm not even sure i was going to post it on here at all. D'oh!



"a monkfish in a pear tree" <mancamera@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:Nrmbj.32928$zw.18076@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
. . . and now i'm on a reverse sleep cycle. Or something like that, anyway.

What makes it ironic of course is the fact that i have enough trouble filling my days - now i've got to find something to keep me occupied during the wee small hours, as well.

Coping with insomnia is a skill. There's a certain knack to it. There were so many sleepless nights when i was a yoof, i had it down cold. I guess these days i'm a little out of practise.

Dealing with solitude is likewise a skill. Just as there are some people who are utterly destroyed by being alone - so used are they to being around other people - there are some people for whom one night of sleep deprivation can reduce them to tears. And i can well understand why. Sleep is a form of daily psychic ablution just as central to our health and wellbeing as any bodily hygiene. There is something somewhat un-hygeinic about someone who cannot sleep. There is a saying which has intrigued me for some years now: "Don't *** where you eat." In other words, keep things in their right place. Keep things seperate that should be kept seperate When one is suffering the effects of sleep deprivation, everything runs together, thought becomes disorganized.

In sleep, our everyday consciousness is comprehensively dismantled. It is a purifying process.

At the same time - and this is something i also have experience of - too much sleep is again what we might describe as 'un-hygienic'. To sleep too much is to lose vital contact with reality. When you're asleep, you develop that thick fuzz on your tongue - and a similar build-up happens to the mind. It stops you from getting at the world. Everything becomes fuzzy, soft around the edges. The cool clear light of consciousness becomes a murky fog.

I can't help but think about different metaphors for madness in this respect. A traditional portrayal of the madman is of someone who has a lower level of consciousness than normal. Throughout the millennia, the madman has been likened by various 'experts' to an aborigine, a child, and the dreamer. One chap whose works i've read in the past and rather enjoyed is called Louis Sass. He turns these classical interpretations on their head. Rather than an individual with lowered consciousness, Sass regards the madman as someone with *too*much* consciousness. "I see too deep and too much" complains Henri Barbusse's hole-in-the-wall-man. Dostoyevsky's Underground man is even more explicit. "I swear, gentlemen," he writes, "that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness." A few lines down he states his case plainly when he renounces "every sort of consciousness" - not just 'pathological' heightened or lowered states, but consciousness itself - as a "disease". Self-consciousness adds a dimension to human actions that has the potential to disrupt our spontaneous relation to the world to its very core. That's what Sass is getting at. With the addition of self-consciousness, we are no longer just in relation to the world, we are in relation to ourselves as well. When self-consciousness is excessive, we end up, not to put too fine a point on it, "shitting where we eat". Our self-consciousness - what we might call our 'egocentrism' - over-rides all knowledge we have of the outside world. In psychosis, we might notice someone is walking behind us and this innoccuous observation, once interpretted through the dense veil of our egocentrism, is transmuted into the belief - more often than not completely erroneous - that this individual is *following* us, that he has a secret agenda as an agent of a much larger conspiracy against us. This is why 'delusions' are often persecutory. A simple observation, made in the presence of self-consciousness, becomes what is sometimes called a paranoid delusion (and yet this happens to each and everyone of us on a daily basis. When the traffic lights change just as we approach them, we feel persecuted. "Why me?" we ask ourselves.) Manic beliefs are similarly a product of

And that's why not being able to sleep is so thoroughly unpleasant

There is a state of mind to being a successful insomniac, is there not? One thing i have noticed on here is that there is a certain understanding between the

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