I close my eyes.
The swirling takes a while to begin. It starts as clouds, just white clouds flitting about in the imagery of my brain, but soon there’s faces and colors that just kind of float across the sky of my third eye. The images start to interact with things I can’t see, then with each other. Magnifying, changing shapes and colors seemingly without purpose or intent. Slowly the images begin to tell stories, fantastical stories that make absolutely no sense at first, but then, as I drop in and abandon any hope to be relieved of this mental imagery, they seem to be my reality. The truth, the very inner workings of life.
And then the sensation of falling scares me back out of the state I had entered.
The clouds come back almost immediately, and the stories are so close behind that the clouds are only a forethought that may not have existed at all. The stories are there just as quickly and soon I’m riding the roller coaster again. Shapes that turn into humans, talking animals telling me what they think I should do, a guru sitting on a mountain that turns into a pot of gold and then into breakfast cereal who then disappears and is forgotten until the story somehow returns to him and he’s the main character and I feel like he’s been there the whole time. He’s telling me to fall in love and to save my true love I have to kiss this frog which will give me poison that I can then use to kill the witch who has my true love which also happens to be a frog that creates the breakfast cereal that is the throne of the guru.
My head starts to itch ripping my brain away from the narrative and back to the fact that I am lying in bed with my eyes closed trying to figure out how to fall asleep. I scratch the itch and wonder about the things my brain is showing me which is to say the things that I am showing myself. Soon the thoughts of how crazy this state is are replaced with flitting clouds, colorful dashes of lightning, thoughts of summer and cold and flowers blooming. Frogs hop across the screen for no apparent reason. Slowly, but consistently, the imagery and narratives return. I am still both awake and at the same time clearly asleep. I have the cognitive whereabouts to know that everything I am seeing is part of falling asleep, but at the same time, I am not falling asleep and the imagery is my world. It’s like being stuck in between two realities that do not align, at all.
The sensation of crashing into the back of my skull returns but instead of ripping me from this state, I finally, and what feels like literally, fall into sleep.
Learning to not Sleep
In my early 20s, I was living in Santiago, Chile as a Mormon Missionary. I was tasked with few things, learn Spanish (and let’s be honest, I barely spoke English) and to teach the good word. The second was highly dependent on the first seeing that to teach someone it is usually easiest if you can actually communicate with them. For full honesty, I went on a mission more to learn Spanish and get the hell out of this town than I did for any desire to spread the good word. I threw myself into learning.
Our routine was simple. We woke up at 7, studied for two hours, got ready and headed out around 10. There was lunch around 1 or 2 and then another break, followed by more walking around till 10 at night when we would return to the apartment. After 6 or so weeks, I was more or less fed up with not being able to talk to folks. I wanted to speak and understand. I started to look at my options and I realized that sleep was in the way. If I didn’t have to sleep, I could accomplish so much more. I started to toy with this idea until it became a good clear idea of what I needed to do. I needed to sleep less and study more.
I altered my routine. I would wake up at 5, study for 4 hours. No big deal. I could easily function and live on 6 hours of sleep. The first day, things went fine. I was a little tired after lunch, but we got an authorized 30-minute nap that I had become expert at taking and waking up exactly on time. Day 2, well that was a tough one, but I was convinced that I could train my body to do this, it would just take some getting used to. As you all know, I am an expert at spelunking in the pain cave and this was no exception. For the next few weeks, I fought my way through each day, studying for 4 hours every morning and then walking the streets for the rest of the day practicing my language.
Eventually, my body broke and decided it was fine functioning on almost no sleep. I would awake at 5, do my thing, go about my day and then pass out broken at the end of the day. It felt good to be the missionary with the most study hours (something we reported weekly) and I began to learn the language. Good thing too, because within a month or so of starting my experiment and really pushing how fast I could learn, they plopped me down in a new area as the senior companion. This meant I had no one to lean on when it came to the language. If I didn’t understand or was unable to communicate, there wasn’t anyone there to help me. I doubled down on my study, continuing the practice for several months.
This was the start of my unhealthy relationship with sleep. I didn’t look at it that way at the time. No, it was a way to improve myself, but it’s obvious now that there was something wrong.
Unraveling the Desire to not Think
I’m an anxious person and most of what I do, or have done, is tied to the motivation of stopping my brain.
It was around this same time in Chile that I understood. There was this group of 3-5 old, crusty guys in Renca where we were “preaching.” They would gather on the corner. Sometimes at noon, sometimes later, but they were there every day that I can remember. And they always had a jug of wine, usually one each. They would stand around and slowly drink their wine. If we past by in the evening, they were loud and ruckus and having a good time, but they were always there. For the first while, I couldn’t figure out the allure. Standing on a corner drinking. It was on a day that I was particularly amped and as we walked by they were past ruckus, they were numb. I realized then the draw, the motivation and it all made sense. They were coping in the way they knew how and I wanted some.
At the time, I had no idea that the endless analyzation, the rethinking each conversation, the nights awake trying to figure out why my brain would not stop, was all part of this thing called anxiety. I knew the word, but it was not in my vocabulary to explain what I experience. Anxiety was something people who lived in LA experienced, I just thought a lot and was insecure always worried about how I would be perceived.
My mission fell apart shortly after and if you fast forward 6 months, I’m back in that same neighborhood as an ex-Elder visiting my fiancé. I don’t recall, for obvious reasons, the reason, but we were having a big dinner. My mother-in-law’s house was laid out with the rooms creating a U shape leaving a courtyard in the middle where the family would gather, the kids played and when it was party time, it was the party space. This particular night, the tables were laid out long and there was an “asado” going on in the front. Everyone was there including the missionaries now assigned to the area. It was probably some guilt I felt, or just being worried about what they were thinking of me, but once we were done eating. I excused myself and headed to the corner.
I wanted to be numb.
I could actually be smart if it wasn’t for all these dead brain cells.
It was some time in 2019 that I realized I could not remember what it was like to fall asleep.
I’m a curious person. I had spent the past 20 years avoiding the possibility of waking up in the middle of the night to toss and turn and worry about shit that I could do nothing about and that would keep my brain rolling for hours until I had to crawl back out of bed that I didn’t know how to actually fall asleep. I would use the excuse that so many use that without a little numbing agent, I could not sleep. When I finally let myself think about what I was saying and realized it wasn’t sleep that I was getting, it was a sedated, self-medicated state that I was substituting for the one thing I really needed, sleep, that I knew, if nothing else, I needed to try sleeping again. It had been so long that I was curious as to what that would mean. What it was like to fall asleep.
Most of the times I had tried to sleep over the past 20 years had ended in an anxiety driven mental overdrive that resulted in eight hours of tossing and turning. This was mostly due to the one thing I was trying to avoid, anxiety. By numbing my brain, I didn’t allow it the time it needed to process what it was that was happening. I’m slow. As in, not smart enough to keep up with most of the world, but I didn’t realize that until I started to learn to sleep again. I quickly found that taking 20 minutes to journal through the day, putting the thoughts to paper and processing whatever was going on in my head would keep the monkey brain at bay. Going for a run, a little meditation in motion, was also incredibly helpful.
The one thing about having anxiety induced insomnia is the latter feeds off the former. Waking up realizing you are anxious just makes you more anxious about not being able to sleep and then being stuck in the frustratingly simple loop of trying to force your brain to stop and your brain running in the opposite direction. Realizing that I needed to allow my brain to process things and it was ok to lay in bed while my brain did its thing, changed the loop. The anxiety is there. My brain wakes up, begins to process everything that I haven’t finished due to being a bit slow, if I let it roll and just lay there, pretty soon the loop stops, the processing is over and poof I’m back to the insane, hallucanegenic party that is sleep.
The first time I tried to actually sleep was a trip. Lying in bed waiting for my brain to do the thing I hadn’t allowed it to do for so long and the imagery, the thoughts, the sensations that started to come were incredible. I’m not going to lie, after experiencing falling asleep, it’s the one trip I started to desire. Not only was it good for me, it was insane what my brain would bring to me.
Hallucinogenic Magic
The globs of color, seemingly disconnected narratives that feel so connected and real, the falling sensation of falling to sleep, all of these things felt brand new and at the same moment incredibly familiar. I wasn’t sure what it all meant, but there has been no downside to learning to sleep. To the point that sleep is now the thing I desire, not the being numb. Sleep in many ways is the natural sedative that stops my brain. I can tell when I haven’t slept enough as the nervous energy and insecurities rise to the surface. I take note, put it in the brain and then make sure that I fall asleep that night. Without fail, I awake rested and relaxed. The processing, the downloading and expelling of the bull shit has happened and my brain can start over.
It’s hallucinogenic magic.
Embrace Chaos. Seek Discomfort.
