Xakara

Punch Drunk Tired:

If you're not nor have ever been an insomniac the phrase "punch drunk tired" may be foreign to you. For the rest o f us it's that point where you've been up for so long, or gone some many days on so little sleep that the entire world is a half shade off. 

It's brighter or darker or funnier or in some way not quite on center and you can't help but marvel at the sparklies on the edge of your vision. As a chronic insomniac it's something you come to enjoy because the alternative is a room with rubber wallpaper and afternoons learning to basketweave. Not quite ready for the asylum, I've gone the "oo, pretty sparklies" route.

Now ever so often I find my way out of the cycle and make it to almost six hours of sleep. It usually takes about 40 hrs up and sleep meds, but it does happen. It's a delicate balance to keep it there and the one thing that undoes it quicker than all else is writing. I am one of the unfortunate few who don't take any illicit or other mind altering substances so sleep deprivation is my big epiphany medium.

I've been too tired to think just like everyone else. But most often I'm too tired to stop thinking. I'll be on a pretty good sleep run of one time or another (less frequent waking, quicker falling to sleep) and while writing something hours will pass and suddenly the sleeping streak is broken. I go to bed, bleary eyed and on my 23rd hour up and still can't turn off.

I force my mind to stop writing what I'm working on only to turn to other projects, concepts and thoughts. Entire stories, excerpts, whole seasons of Law and Order: SVU, I've written them all in my head during one exceptionally bad bout or another and it seems to get worse every year.

I've begun to wonder on some level if subconsciously I break a sleeping streak just to feel that creative overflow while working on a writing project. Some of my best stuff has been written when I had to lay my head down between paragraphs just to catch a little rest before I could go on. I don't enjoy the side effects and the other things that are impacted, but when the writing is flowing and the stories are floating so close to the surface of consciousness that I can read the pages through the water...well, it's hard to pass that up even for my own good.

I've always wondered if it's the same for other artists who find themselves drinking or using in order to work in their chosen medium. No matter what they tell themselves about their health and feeling better it always creeps back when they start jonesing for that creative outlet. They need to work, to purge, to create and so in the end they fall back on the thing that gets them through.

They can create sober as well as I can create rested, but it's not what comes to mind when you walk up to the canvass or blank screen. No, when you're there you're just thinking of the last time you were there. The last time that things turned out exactly the way you wanted it and everyone who saw it understood.  You think about how it felt and what you did and you wonder if you can reproduce the results. You wonder if you have to be under the same influence to do so. Maybe it's not a conscious thought, but it's there.

"If I stay up just a little longer I think I'll be able to get through this chapter". A true thought, but in the end what's happened in staying up is that I've grown more and more tired, and in that tiredness, in that blooming exhaustion is the place where the mind lets go and everything feels in reach. If that doesn't sound like a drug....

Maybe the classic alcoholic writer or drug addicted painter are addicts because they get just too much sleep and the high of exhaustion is unattainable. You never know. *grin*

What's your mind alteration of choice when other worlds are calling?

Ramble done. 

'Til

~X