This post is under construction
On Insomnia, Part 1
As the anniversary rolls around, I remember February 2024 as the beginning of a mental health crisis lasting about two-months. During that time, I struggled with relentless insomnia, and had trouble sustaining more than 1-2 hours of sleep each night due to panic attacks lasting for hours, leaving me exhausted and on the edge.
At the worst of it, I had taken about three different type of sleep aids with the hopes it will serve as the solution. The sedatives worked to shut down my already sleep-deprived body, but my hyperaroused mind refused to follow, leaving me stranded in hypnagogia. I found myself in a state of sleep paralysis limbo where my body had “fallen asleep” but my mind had experienced all 6 hours of the night. I felt like a commuter who had missed the last late-night bus until the next morning. It was reminiscent of the stories I would hear of people experiencing sensory deprivation chambers. Eyes grow bored of the darkness and hallucinate shapes behind the eyelids. The ears uncomfortable with the silence starts to whisper to itself in the form of blood flowing through the artery, the heartbeat slowly grew louder until it is at a volume that is maddening. I was trapped within my own mind, a place that no longer felt safe.
Andrew Birds’ Toxic Perfectionism
Suzuki-method, whistling virtuoso, and violinist Andrew Bird has never been an artist bounded by genre. The storytelling lyricism and fingerstyled violin and guitar of Pulaski and Night and Sisypgus gives a folksy, troubadour-like quality. His experimental early work in as Thrills feature influences in Americana-laced swing and and gyspy jazz. And his complex arrangement in many choruses and his instrumental works like Echolocations or Outside Problems are reminiscent of Baroque or Romantic-era classical music. Beyond his technical prowess, Bird’s songwriting often wrestles the mind’ contradiction, for instance, his 2022 album Inside Problem delves into inner turmoil and late night anxieties. However, these themes have sat ruminating in Bird’s repository in the decade prior.
This fixation on self-reflection and mental loops is central to Eyeoneye from the 2012 album Break it Yourself, a song that dissects toxic perfectionism, emotional resilience, and the self-destructive nature of excessive introspection. It’s a song notable enough that Bird did a TedTalk about it. He describes overt self-awareness as “an eye trying to see itself, or an ear trying to hear itself”, and demonstrates live by purposefully bringing the mic close to the speaker, creating a high-pitched feedback loop that leaves the audience unnerved, yet intrigued. He humorously adds “this is the sound of self-destruction”.
Like audio looping back into a mic, weird things happen when you get too close to your source. For example, mad cow disease happens when you feed cows their own brains. These are neurogenerative diseases that can also occur in humans in the form of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease or fatal familial insomnia. There’s also the genetic incompatibility during incest, A more personal example: when making mistakes that hurt others, a particularly growth-orientated individual can often retreat into introspection. It can easily spiral into a sort of fantastic voyage/ redemption fantasy where you journey within yourself to eliminate the causing “disease”, as a means to never repeat the mistake again. A noble cause! But the danger lies when mistakes become integrated into your self-worth instead of your actions. Like an autoimmune disease or a cancer, in attempting to fix youself from within, you can unintentionally eliminates and destroys the healthy cells that make up you.
The song’s lyrics reveal how this can be deeply unpleasant. Bird sings about the process of helping yourself in: “give yourself a hand, the hand is your hand”, in which the repetition reinforces themes of recursive loops. In referring to the aforementioned hand that is your own, Bird sings “And you go ahead and wring it out / You go ahead and stretch it out / You go ahead and wear it inside out”. It’s a gruesome image that suggest an endless, labored, and exhaustive process to achieve an elusive and impossible standard of perfection.
Bird critiques the modern obsession with self-improvement, where the drive to constantly better oneself can ironically lead to self-destruction. The song illustrates how these ideals can, when taken too far, become counterproductive and harmful. To be introspective is like staring into the hole that is your inner world, in hopes to find the root cause of a problem. This hole is a great place to do work
To grow requires your heart to be broken. When in isolation, you must do the unpleasant thing of breaking it yourself. The healthier path is to grow by letting people in, allowing them to challenge you, help you, and sometimes even hurt you. Love is labor.
Eternal Night of The Jaunt
Stephen King’s The Jaunt, my personal favorite feature in his short story collection Skeleton Crew explores humanity reaching the capacity of teleportation as a mode of travel (which they call “jaunting”). It is as commonplace as taking a bus. You take a seat, take a quick nap courtesy of some anesthesia, and almost instantly you wake up at Mars.
The meat of the story is a lot of backstory, and the horror comes completely from the implication. The plot opens with a lengthy recount of the discovery of the process, with scientist in his garage– very Jeff Goldblume in The Fly. Mad with discovery, the scientist is in glee with the successful transportation of various inanimate objects: a pencil emerges able to write, a set of keys successfully starts his car, a wristwatch still kept time (King always had a fascination with including watches in his stories), and a calculator functions perfectly. The machine is able to recreate these items to near physical perfection. Increasing in complexity, he tries a mice. Squirming with a desire of escape, the mouse is thrown in, but emerges a husk. Its body is flawlessly replicated and alive as it aspirates, but its eyes devoid of sentience. It almost immediately collapses in death.
While this technology often explored whimsically in other Scifi media, it becomes more disturbing the more you think about! The more tame mechanism of action involves breaking space– the bending of spacetime by creating a wormhole to join to locations together that a subject can pass through, completely intact. Pretty harmless. The second mechanism is more nefarious, and involves breaking us– the deconstruction of living tissue, atom by atom, and delivering the pieces to the destination where the body is reassembled. Metaphysically, one could theorize that this process effectively kills the original and recreates a discontinuous copy with neurons that only happen to make up an identical but unrelated consciousness. But we can never know for sure– what if conscious continuity is maintained? What does the consciousness perceive when it is disconnected from a body?
Rudy, the first living human to experience jaunting fully conscious and without anesthetics. He was a death row inmate that was promised full pardon after taking part of this experiment.shuffles out with his hair immediately white with stress and eyes bulging blankly with the impression of great age. “What happened?” a scientist asks. Rudy could only answer: “It’s eternity in there” before collapsing of a heart attack.
Sleep is famously a process that runs independent of time. In many video games, interacting with a bed serves as a form of time travel that brings the player to the next day almost instantly. You can take a late afternoon nap, and wake up without an sense of what time it is. Dreams can stretch for what seems like hours, only to have taken a few minutes in reality. In the Jaunt, it is unconsciousness that shields the observer from experiencing the full length of perceived time. What if the way consciousness flickers out in sleep hints at something for fundamental about our perception of time? The unsettling question about teleportation isnt whether the person that emerges in the other side is you or not. Its about what happens in between.
To the scientists, Rudy’s jaunt of a two mile distance was nearly instantaneously– almost 0.000000000067 of a second. However, to a mind of pure awareness experiencing the infinite void without the buffer of bodily or sensory input, Rudy perceived the journey to last an incomprehensible amount of time. This is what makes The Jaunt so chilling—not just the idea of losing one’s body, but the possibility of being left alone with one’s own mind, forever.
When reading the Jaunt, I was mislead into different ideas of where King was taking the story. As the scientist seemingly amputates his fingers, or when he observes the cross section of a mouse he would only insert half-way, I was expecting body horror. Afterwards, my rumination on the incomprehensible creature Rudy was possibly seeing in the spatial in-between drew me to cosmic horror. There is no blood or monsters, the true horror of this story is simply time.
On Insomnia Part 2
Analysis coming soon!
During those long nights, I began to understand a sliver of the madness Rudy may have experienced in the void of The Jaunt Isolation is a common thread in insomnia, Eyeoneye, and the Jaunt.
The root of hyperarousal for me is rather layered. I can be a little neurotic, being a person who obsesses over the value I bring to others. I scrutinize my words, fearing hurting others. I simultaneously feel a desire to be present for others, while fearing I can be too overbearing. There exists an extreme desire for control in my life do work that enriches the lives of others. To bring this neuroticism to something that is completely out of our control– like sleep or health– is a dangerous combination. A completely normal instance of poor sleep transformed into a full health anxiety spiral around fears of a brain tumor or a rare genetic disease known as fatal familial insomnia. The fear prevented my brain to fully relax, as I fixated on every bodily sensation
In retrospect, I know now the mechanics of insomnia. A concept known as hyperarousal keeps the nervous system in a heightened state of alertness, making it difficult for the mind to transition into a state of sleep. The reasons behind hyperarousal can vary: pain from an illness or injury can decrease sleep quality by maintain a sense of “bodily awareness”, or stress and anxiety can elicit a feeling of hypervigilence around a potential threat. That is all to say: this is a beautiful process that kept our ancestors alert to handle threats. But problematic in the modern era when you’re trying to get rest before a presentation or important job interview. Regardless, it is something normal.
v
In the case of Eyeoneye,
Prolonged isolation can do great damage to the mind.
Addition points to continue writing:
- Tying to The Jaunt by demonstrating the horror of experience the full period of night, without the relief of sleep
- Tying to Andrew Bird by
- How I got out
In retrospect, I know now the mechanics of insomnia. A concept known as hyperarousal keeps the nervous system in a heightened state of alertness, making it difficult for the mind to transition into a state of sleep. The reasons behind hyperarousal can vary: pain from an illness or injury can decrease sleep quality by maintain a sense of “bodily awareness”, or stress and anxiety can elicit a feeling of hypervigilence around a potential threat. That is all to say: this is a natural and normal process that kept our ancestors alert to handle threats. But problematic in the modern era when you’re trying to get rest before a presentation or important job interview. Regardless, it is something normal.
Self-isolating is something I am familiar with for better or for worst. As a Buddhist, I often think of the concept of śūnyatā. When reading about it I imageine myself in a saltwater ocean with a goldfish. But for any concept, to understand something and experience something are entirely different experuences
Fatal familial insomnia
Hyperfixate
These thoughts are brought to you by:
- Sleep Coach School: Based in Eugene, Oregon, a city near and dear to my heart. The
- Open Path Collective: This post is likely the most open I It seems like insurance is designed to fail when you actually need it.
- Diet A&W: We all have our vices: Alcohol, smoking, weed, sex… Mine is sugary drinks– a vice I an happy with because there’s some pretty delicious alternatives in the form of diet sofas (When people tell me “pick your poison: diabetes or cancer?”). Diet A&W is notable The Sleep Coach School
| [Affordable Counseling | Affordable Therapy | Open Path Collective](https://openpathcollective.org) |