Sleep, or Lack Thereof

SLEEP, a five-letter word said to be “a complex state which is qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different from wakefulness and which is initiated and maintained by specific mechanisms.”1 It is a word that "is generally not questioned in ordinary conversation, and we do not have to look it up in the dictionary."2

People sleep because it makes them work better and more efficiently, and it revitalizes them for another long day.

It is common knowledge that not all of us have the same good night’s rest. Unfortunately, I am one of those who, more often than not, end up waking up even more exhausted than they were when they slept.

Every single day for the past few years, I have grown more and more envious of people who get at least eight hours of sleep.

Unless you have the same sleeping habit I have, you will never fully understand what I mean – and will be babbling about in this entry.

As a kid, those sleepless nights were not always there. I even found staying up late to be something positive, a privilege even – maybe because what I had considered “late nights” never even reached 11:00 p.m. I thought it was something to look forward to – those long nights for you to play video games, watch television, or do any other activity you enjoyed without interruption.

But during those days, the only time I could really keep myself awake in the wee hours of the morning was when I would be with my cousins playing. But even those moments did not always turn out that way. More often than not, I would catch myself being awakened by my parents or my yaya (nanny) for the sole reason that it was time we head home.

I am now in my senior year in high school and I can lucidly remember that this "routine" – my staying up late – only became a habit when I was midway through elementary.

Imagine having that problem from the fourth grade until now – that is almost seven years of “torture”.

Night after night, for seven years, I would unconsciously be flipping through channels, viewing various websites, or worse, staring blankly into space. (Imagine having a thousand crickets around chirping all night; and finding that you yourself are not being bothered even a tad bit.)

For almost the entirety of those seven years, I never really had a problem with this sleeping habit of mine. Not until last month, December 2007, when I started feeling the ill effects of this "routine".

After the third quarter examinations in my school, I suddenly had a hard time sleeping early again. I found myself talking to friends online or over the phone until the wee hours of the morning or until they become sleepy. I would stay up late at night – more like early in the morning – having nothing to do. I felt as if I had visited all the possible websites that would interest me: from various social networking communities to video and game sharing communities. Even though I have done quite a lot with those applications, I still can't seem to stop. Four out of five times, I would just stare at those pages, with my mind completely out of focus.

If you ask my friends about what I had done during the Christmas break, chances are, they would say that I had been spewing continuous "paragraph vomit" for a number of days. It was literal word puke – they did not have much sense in them, nor the presence of proper punctuation; but they were out there. If you look at their length without reading them, they would pass as journal entries on their own – and I have written quite a handful of them. I try to read and re-read them again, and every single time, I get shocked at how I could be talking about one thing and the next word is completely far from it. (Yes, the lack of punctuation made things seem worse – hopefully I did not seem illiterate to my peers.)

Maybe it was just the caffeine and my sleeping habit – or the lack of proper ones – that led me to write whatever I had in mind. It was a wooly state I would not recommend to anyone.

Up to this moment, I still think that I might have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, “a daily sleep/wake rhythm in which the onset of sleep and wake times are later than desired; the person tends to go to bed later and get up later each day.”3 I am still in the condition, which I termed as my "caffeinated zombie mode," wherein I am physically here, doing what I normally do; the only difference is that my mind is not at par with my usual self.

I wish you, who (un)fortunately read this, would never have to feel what I continue to experience. Sleep is something too precious to let go – that idea, I had to learn at such a young age.

Insomnia is a gross feeder.  It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

 ~ Clifton Fadiman

References: 

1, 2. undefined. (undefined). Department of Medicine - What Is Sleep. In Department of Medicine - Home Page.         Retrieved January 8, 2008, from     http://www.medicine.wisc.edu/mainweb/DOMPagesText.php?section=sleepmed&page=whatissleep.

3. undefined. (undefined). Sleep Disorder, Insomnia, Sleep Apnea Medical Dictionary. In Health Information &     Medical   Information from Harvard Health. Retrieved January 8, 2008, from http://www.health.harvard.edu/dictionary/Improving-Sleep.htm.

(written on the 8th of January 2008)