Insomnia

If you have never had to deal with the wracking mental trauma of insomnia I really, really, really, really, really, really, really envy you.

But envy is a funny thing. Even thought you may want something, you can also know that it will not really make you happy.

Picture for a moment that you are working in a factory. At first it's fairly pleasant – air conditioning, lunch breaks, co-worker meetings, the whole shebangitee enchilada. Your job is fairly simple. Every thirty seconds a round ball drops out of a pipe into a bucket nearby, and you have to pick up this ball and put it through a round hole in your desk. Nothing could be simpler. Your job is oddly satisfying, because every morning you walk past a window where you can see the ordered warehouse where all these balls have been linked up and neatly positioned according to their individual properties.

One night (because in this metaphor it makes more sense for you to work the night-shift) You arrive at the factory, sit at your desk and realise something is wrong. The hole on your desk isn't round anymore. It's triangular.

You give a start as the first ball arrives, and, ball in hand, you try to fit it into the triangular hole. It doesn't fit. For no determinable reason whatsoever an essential part of your process has been disrupted. You struggle for a while, but there is still absolutely no way a round ball can fit in a triangular hole.

You check the bucket. Five more balls have arrived since the ordeal began, and you have no idea what to do with them. You manhandle each in turn, daring to hope that one may be triangular, or even that by staring at one of them long enough it will become triangular.

Ok, you think to yourself, don't give up yet. Something is wrong down in storage, but if I order the balls up here in my office, then everything will be fine.

You rapidly arrange the balls on the floor of your office, but try as you might you can't stop them from rolling around and banging into one another. The floor starts shaking, the florescent lights get brighter and the tintinnabulation of colliding office supplies is dreadful. Now you not only have to sort this mess out, but you are having difficulty concentrating, too.

Nothing changes. Day after day, you return to an office in chaos. Every now and then a few of the balls squeeze through, but never fast enough to keep up with the supply of new ones arriving from the pipe. Eventually and almost horrifically you get used to it. The mess of chromoplastic balls sit around and yell loudly at you when you look straight at them. Sure, the lights and the clinking and the vibrating room has given you a headache, but you deal with it. There is a kind of calm acceptance that settles over you as you realise there is nothing you can do; from now on, you either learn to function with the chaos or you drown in the rising tide of coloured balls. It changes you. You stop going home. You stop attending the office parties, and when you do, you can't stop thinking of how everything is piling up back in your office and you need to take care of it.

You spend a lot of time sitting around and thinking of how to deal with the problem. Sometimes you think it might be best for you to quit your job, but honestly, what else is there out there, anyway? Just triangular holes and odd shapes, where nothing ever fits in. You resolve to stick with it and find a solution. Your sanity – if it still exists at this point – depends on it.

You set about filing and ordering everything as best as you can, and as the physical world has failed you, you have to do so in your mind. You notice that no two balls are exactly the same colour – they can be separated by spectrum, by size, by texture – subtle differences and links exist between each of them. The factory has failed you, and so none of this intricate work is automated anymore: you have to do all of it by yourself, manually.

Oddly enough, you start to think of this new system as better than the old one. You understand things now, rather than just walking past a window and seeing the finished product, you are the deciding factor in that pattern. You are exhausted, and unsure if it is all worth it, but you understand. Before your life had such a small meaning behind it; and sure, it was a good meaning and made you happy but this – this is greatness. You can see every one of the coloured balls. You have become the sole determining factor in the success of the factory.

One day, you may realise that the triangular hole is round again, and you may decide to use it. If not, all the ideas in your head stay with you and surround you. You learn to fit them into place as soon as they fall through the pipe. Your whole mind functions as one being, driven perpetually by a stream of consciousness weathering a storm of distractions and inhibitions.

But you can smile to yourself, madly, because at last you are in control.

Living in such a state of perpetual madness and thought is difficult to describe. 'Sleep' in its most basic form still exists; you can lie down on a bed, feel a numb sensation in your limbs, close your eyes and forget about everything around you - to a point it is even relaxing, though waking up leaves you feeling just as worn out as before you 'slept'. The main difference is that there is no dreaming, and no blank release from thought. Most nights I just lie there and keep thinking, sometimes the same thing for an hour without realising it, and at other times I actively pursue ideas and theories with this clean detachment from everything else that I marvel at in my 'waking hours'.

Now that I've become used to it, living in a state of mental torpor is second nature. I weight the cost of energy behind everything I do (this gets seriously ridiculous at times. For example I'll swivel around in my chair to use an online dictionary rather than lifting the heavy hard copy one on my desk), and I avoid bright lights (like the sun) and unplug noisy appliances (like cellphone chargers. I'm still not sure if real people can actually hear these from across a room like I do) because senses burrow into my head and make everything feel jiggly. The fact is I've realised that I'll never stop being tired and I have to live with magnified distractions all the time. So, I give myself 8 hours of 'sleep' a day and I find ways to block out those small, annoying sensations that are intensified by restlessness. I multitask, blocking out any room for wayward thought or error, and I try to keep a constant 5 minute plan ahead of time. Focus, in other words. The mind is always an incredibly busy place - and when it runs out of work to do, it throws a raucous party. Thus, to stop any mental congo line from disrupting your concentration and giving you a headache, you have to make sure it is well stocked with a collection of nigh impossible tasks.

The most odd feeling of all, after you learn to live with the charming nightmare that is insomnia, is that when you do fall asleep - into honest to goodness, sword-fights with marshmellows floaty floaty sleep - you wake up and feel like nothing is exactly where you left it. Its as though that whole sensation of hustle-bustle clarity you cultivated over the past week was the 'dream' and now that you are back the laws of science aren't quite how you remembered them. Nothing seems to add up; your keyboard, which you could type on blindfolded before, has moved a quarter inch beneath your fingertips. Gravity doesn't pull you down, but off to the side, so you stumble and feel like you are falling even when you are just sitting in your chair. Heck, even your body feels different. You look down at your hands and they feel lighter, and when your fingers brush up against one another they spark off matter-of-fact textile sensations which... don't add up. Nothing adds up. Its an absolute psychological trip, and it leaves you questioning reality and pining for a return to that stable hold you had over everything before you slipped off.

At heart, everything is in chaos. At times we learn to live with that chaos, and at that precise moment it decides to change its nature - because hey, chaos is change (unless you are Greek, in which 'Chaos' is 'Void' which implies a lack of change).

Okay, that's about it.