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Gentle rain, unquiet brain
Sep. 1st, 2006 09:38 pmFor the past two days there's been steady, gentle, cool, refreshing rain. It feels so quiet and calm. I miss rain like this, that lasts for days instead of hours. I seem to remember Pittsburgh getting this kind of rain more often than the Eastern seaboard places I've lived ever since.
In this case, of course, it is because of the tattered remnants of a tropical storm passing overhead.
I've been bursting lately with the need to conlang, to invent languages. For a few weeks or a month, the pressure has been built up in me. However, I've been holding off because I don't have a brain! Conlanging is a creative effort that I can only satisfactorily engage in with the part of my brain that doesn't thrive on lack of sleep. Currently I can only do straightforward, a-then-b type thinking, and not even enough of that. Memory is shot; things I wanted to do surface in my mind like debris under a waterfall, and I try to catch them while they're on the surface, before they swirl back under again. I am interrupt-driven. I must do what I remember, when I remember it.
All my life I've used lack of sleep to slow my brain down to the point where I can get simple daily things done, but certainly not this much lack of sleep. Since two weeks ago I have my connected sleep back - most nights - but I have traded sheer hours of sleep for that privilege, I think. I am not sure. I do not have records of how much sleep I lost waiting 1/2 an hour each time the baby fell back asleep before moving him back to the crib, under the old regime. (Under the new regime, if he does convince us to get him up and feed him, he goes back in right afterwards, asleep or awake - and likes it.)
I don't think I've ever run my brain in full getting-enough-sleep mode for more than three days in a row, since high school at least. Certainly not five days. It was college when I first realized that lack of sleep functioned like reins on my brain. Once it gets fully powered up, my brain goes out of control; I get obsessed with something, and start focussing in on narrower and narrower aspects of the problem until I'm only running through an obsessive series of simulations - and invariably (even fortunately), in this state I stay up way too late, which causes a crash back to dull, a-then-b thinking. The cycle may have been influenced by hormones; it sometimes seemed synched to my monthly cycle, a problem I don't have at the moment.
I'm not really in danger of getting that much sleep these days. Maybe I should try, though. Maybe without a monthly hormonal cycle, the out-of-control part wouldn't happen.
And anyway, for the first time in my life I think life is becoming challenging enough that I could really use my brain.
In this case, of course, it is because of the tattered remnants of a tropical storm passing overhead.
I've been bursting lately with the need to conlang, to invent languages. For a few weeks or a month, the pressure has been built up in me. However, I've been holding off because I don't have a brain! Conlanging is a creative effort that I can only satisfactorily engage in with the part of my brain that doesn't thrive on lack of sleep. Currently I can only do straightforward, a-then-b type thinking, and not even enough of that. Memory is shot; things I wanted to do surface in my mind like debris under a waterfall, and I try to catch them while they're on the surface, before they swirl back under again. I am interrupt-driven. I must do what I remember, when I remember it.
All my life I've used lack of sleep to slow my brain down to the point where I can get simple daily things done, but certainly not this much lack of sleep. Since two weeks ago I have my connected sleep back - most nights - but I have traded sheer hours of sleep for that privilege, I think. I am not sure. I do not have records of how much sleep I lost waiting 1/2 an hour each time the baby fell back asleep before moving him back to the crib, under the old regime. (Under the new regime, if he does convince us to get him up and feed him, he goes back in right afterwards, asleep or awake - and likes it.)
I don't think I've ever run my brain in full getting-enough-sleep mode for more than three days in a row, since high school at least. Certainly not five days. It was college when I first realized that lack of sleep functioned like reins on my brain. Once it gets fully powered up, my brain goes out of control; I get obsessed with something, and start focussing in on narrower and narrower aspects of the problem until I'm only running through an obsessive series of simulations - and invariably (even fortunately), in this state I stay up way too late, which causes a crash back to dull, a-then-b thinking. The cycle may have been influenced by hormones; it sometimes seemed synched to my monthly cycle, a problem I don't have at the moment.
I'm not really in danger of getting that much sleep these days. Maybe I should try, though. Maybe without a monthly hormonal cycle, the out-of-control part wouldn't happen.
And anyway, for the first time in my life I think life is becoming challenging enough that I could really use my brain.
