Severely sleep deprived

Author status while writing post: severely sleep deprived, low effort

I struggle with sleep, didn’t use to as much back in the day. Or so I’d like to think. As a kid I’d stay up late, against my parents’ wishes, trying to read a book or do some journalling under my duvet with a torch. It was always fun trying to predict when they might pop in to check as to whether I was still awake, turning everything off at just the right moment so they don’t realize. There was the separate issue of CO2, in that it’d get very humid and I’d sweat, only occasionally getting out of the duvet to gasp for air. Many a cherished memory, but also many a sleep deprived day, since I’d be sleeping at around 2 AM and would have to get up at 6 or 7 AM to get on the bus for school. I wonder how much neural development I lost due to sleep deprivation across my life.

Yeah sleep was never for me.

Mind you, after a while my consciousness will always inevitably collapse at some point. But there’s such a strong instinct or push from within to go on. There’s so much to do, so much to see, so much to write, so much to read. If anything, the focus I get from writing in the dark with no other distraction, just the silence of the city, no messaging apps, no demands: it’s perfect. The equivalent of being in a monastery.

I know about the significant importance of sleep schedule and length (the former being more important than the latter; it’s nearly always better to wake up at the same time as usual than to try and recover sleep hours, look it up). I acknowledge I’m losing god knows how many IQ points in total across my life. Yet, it still doesn’t come naturally. Nowadays I need a cute softly spoken story, an in-depth dive into a random technical topic, or a person in my bed to co-regulate with.

This is in stark contrast to my friend back in high school who claimed he could knock himself out by doing a mental move that shuts his brain off. Would take him around a minute to get knocked out. Of course, I have no way of verifying this, but he was truthful most of the time, so seems legit. I did try this out at various points and I think I did get the hang of it, but now it’s a lost art for me.

8 hours out of 24, a third of the day. Wild. I did do a couple weeks of lucid dream training to at least try and make use of it (or at least remember it, because after all it is an internal story generator). And it did work! Again, now a lost art, but it was quite a beautiful experience flying over utopian Earth-like worlds, being all sorts of different creatures, creating a cute little home in orbit around the Earth. Would strongly recommend, don’t really see this kind of thing being tried by youngins of our day, but it’s likely I’m just not aware.