Sleep Deprivation Sucks
Lack of sleep is rough. This past week, due to various circumstances, I've not gotten very much sleep. Most nights saw only 2-4 hours of sleep. Yesterday, I woke up, stumbled through my morning rituals in typical morning-zombie fashion, only to find it was three hours before my alarm was scheduled to go off. That hurt. I had 2-3 hours of sleep, and yesterday is a big haze. But I finally got some sleep last night, so deeply in fact it took several minutes for my mind to notice my alarm this morning. But at least I feel human again.
Sleep deprivation, particularly systemic sleep deprivation in the form of shitty work schedules, insomnia, et cetera, is brutal to the mind, body, and soul. In the past, I've suffered from bouts of insomnia, usually when I was under extreme levels of stress. Working as an on-call systems admin, the stress and schedules of work can oftentimes exacerbate an otherwise brief period of insomnia into weeks to months long roller-coasters of fitful-if-any sleep.
Chuck Palahniuk nailed insomnia in Fight Club. The world does grow more remote. It does start to seem degraded and faded. You begin to feel disconnected from the surroundings after a while. Eventually, you enter a state where surreality becomes your reality. It's a horrible place to be. It's insanity, simply through lack of sleep. A brutal, horrific reality that we fragile creatures need our down time to maintain ourselves.
After a while I could feel, or though I could anyway, the skitterings of dark things going on in my head once I reached a certain point in an insomnia fit. I started calling it "crab-wise" since your thoughts seem to skitter sideways from one to the other in an uncontrolled illogical fashion. I remember at one point, at the deepest darkest murkiest point of one of my worst bouts of insomnia, the entire world seemed to consist of howling monkeys, every person seeming less and less human as they screeched about whatever they were babbling about around me. Who needs psychedelics when you can get better and scarier effects from not sleeping?
Luckily the insomnia has gone away for the most part. My stress has been greatly reduced; mostly by changing jobs, but also by meeting, courting, and marrying my wife. I no longer suffer from being unable to sleep, now I just get screwed by circumstances and lose some sleep every once in a while. I'm glad the crab-wise days are gone, but part of me misses the surreality I used to experience regularly. It made our fucked up world easier to handle in some ways...