This act of “sleep catastrophizing” is ten times as commonly reported as other disruption stimuli, centered in our tendency to dwell on the worst possible outcomes of a given situation.11 The self around the brain — a larger meat sleeve, wearing being — knows the brain knows more than one could fit in any minute or hold full in one frame. And so the frame shakes. And the self shakes. And in the self, so shakes the blood, the mood, the night, disturbing, in the system, further waking, further wanting, if for the smallest things, the days of junk, reinforced on both sides — inside the mind and in the flesh — an endless and constant shifting phasing phrase of how one might sit inside one’s body, inside one’s air, inside the inside… It is this act of minor replication, the rolling thinking, which in bulk gives want its weight: layers upon layers, cells rubbing against cells, recursed. Many of the most common, overarching sleep catastrophizers concern sleep itself: “I will feel bad the following morning”; “The backlog at work will build because I cannot concentrate”; “I won’t be nice company”; “I will have low self-esteem”; “My boss will shout at me”; and so on.
As the chain of days deepens in this thinking, its resonance upon cognition tends to increase, digging a thicker hole.12 Some nights the self seems to flood so thick it might never turn off — no clear center, overflowed — a sudden nod turning to surging — small juts of adrenaline, like a grenade of sun against the chest upon the cusp of X-ing out, eyes spinning in the black meat of the head—I am not asleep now. I am not asleep now. — looking somewhere heavy in there for some traction, a truer blank inside the blank. In the same way as an evening in the grip seems subject to a periodicity of night, so too do these patterns propel themselves over spans of several days, packages of ruin followed by, at last, perhaps, a recovery evening, in whole crash. And even further out, over weeks or months or years, or into packs of years, in decades, the condition might unfurl, become quiet, massive at once, sudden, returning in the wake of its seeming disregard, a flooding flood of flux and flux of flux, unto any inch of self becoming questioned, blurry, some faceless lock without a key.
The Uncontrollable Reflection
It might begin in any way. In fighting its own exit, on the pillow, my brain at night will cling to anything it can corral — however dumb or old or overreaching. The idle thought initiates itself. The feeling of the thought sometimes seems to spin or worm inside my forehead, or I might roll mnemonically inside it, as in a terrifying drunk. Then the first thought begets the second, following its sound. Usually the thought is not of something massive — the bigger worries of the day already so embedded they are as if part of the air — but instead the mind often comes to take hold of the smallest bolt or jut of time — then the thought births the next thought.13 I might think, for instance, of what happened hours before the want for bed came, again online, sitting with my machine killing hours clicking in endless queue of electronic day — how I ended up again in Facebook’s14 black hole — jumbling through nothing, staring at images of head after new head, until maybe I landed on a particular friend’s profile, someone who I’ve mostly only ever known online, and who as a result I know differently than friends as bodies — their words, their wants or ideas, each day in silence fed15—and here inside the night inside the hour I leave a comment there about them on their electronic wall, words passed herein by pressing buttons into a board I used all day to press letters into other names in other ways, perhaps a random observation spent in passing or maybe a congratulations or inside joke, text for nothing but transition,
these are the words that came into my head today when I thought of you,16 another small memory totem of the era, soon to be pushed down in tally as others also comment, the sentiment to be blinked on for some small moment perhaps and then sent archived into the never-ending electronic mush,17 another hiccup in the night. This inane quasi-interaction, the likes of which occur for many at least several dozen times a day, in e-mail and in clicking, should have ended just at that — though now hereafter, in my own space, I find the thought returning in my head, the presence of the pressing somehow still there in me in stupid residue clogging portals in the place where I would like to be now entering a sleep — it occurs as if from out of nowhere, certainly not chosen18—and now suddenly this small amusement has somehow become the one that will not leave me be, the offhand phrase remaining haunting in my head without my trying, not jolted but simply in there, reoccurred now because I know that it exists — and now in wanting such a thought gone the thinking of the thought brings it back again further solidified, spreading out in strobe upon my attention for some reason beyond the at least several billion other instants like it, at least, among all the other days — and from there on, my frame, roiling out into further mental furies in abstraction, the thought begetting thought again because it can, replacing whatever calm or wear I’d felt before bedtime again in me turning on, filled up with something other than the nowhere that I want — and so now inside a thought inside the thought I might imagine this manifested person — who, again, I hardly know beyond some abstract premonition based on their profile and whatever else they’ve flung into the void — I’ll see them in my head sitting there somewhere before the computer just like I do but here rendered in my head in their own home,19 a version of it somewhat based on where I live, I imagine, though skewed into how those ideas of who they are might make them reflect in the surfaces by which they are surrounded — I will see them seeing the comment I have left in my own typing between us through the wires20—I will see them in their own body, in their chair, sometime between the time of when I posted it and in the minute of my imagining, an event which might not have even happened, they might not see their machine again for days, might not even give a shit to look at Facebook for some long time, and yet there inside me, there they are — I will see them sitting in the glowlight of the machine seeing whatever words I’ve made, however stupid, that small nothing, taking the symbols of the words once used to form other words into their eyes, their brain taking those words in and translating to their own brain, all words mutating both in how they’re read and over time21—I will imagine that person in his or her house with whoever they live with maybe drinking water, as had I, the computer light also against their skin shifting as they click over from the page that brought that comment to another, any one of however many million websites they could choose to, white to blue inside that one silent and sharing glow, or in conflict with other lights inside their house and other voices,22 all the other light around the house, and already this whole thought is stupid, I begin thinking, realizing I’ve been in this hole of thought for several minutes23 here at least, and why am I thinking of this above all things, why in the mass of squirm that sits in anything will I find myself centered on someone inside of a machine, where is the silence that fills other people, and why won’t I at least stop here having recognized I’m thinking on into such dumb, to give up and enter sleep now in a clean mode, shut off the thought from spreading any further in this manner, smearing even this simplest of actions,24 though then just as quickly I am again thinking perhaps again about that person, perhaps how inside their own home or air they spent their day,25 what they did today while I did what I did with mine here, out where I am,26 two twin systems in a system of systems, spinning on, and all those other lives in bodies going on beside them also, or what their life is like on any day at all, days that both begin and end so fast and are so slow, though often in finding I can’t imagine them beyond the machine or in my own patterns I realize I have no idea what rooms there are beyond this room, and who are these people really and how did I come to bounce about them anytime at all, who am I even talking about really, what is this picture, how could this be going on and on27—and yet, inside the image of the body of them in this spinning I will still wonder if I imagine the person of the image of the person today or any day is happy28—happiness or sadness being one room off the human almost anyone could understand — are they happy right this minute or in a broad sense, why or why not, what if they are not happy at all, happy with their life here, their life of which I have so small of an idea, what would make them happy, what could I do, me, what could someone other than me do, could this supposed person who I’ve mostly only ever known in pictures and small typing ever be the kind of person that could kill his or her self29—how would that feel — how would they do it, how would it feel inside their heads, how would it affect me — why am I wondering if this person is going to kill his or her self, this body I hardly know anything about them anywhere at all, what do I know about them, or any person, I imagine, what do I know about my mom, what do I know about who I was last year or ten years back or who I am right now, what happened to all those people I used to see daily at school or in other rooms, what happened to anybody, who is alive, what if this person who I’ve hardly or not at all met did something awful, what if tonight or right now, and then there inside my mind I might see this person shifted, in my image30 of them, hair and teeth and cheeks and eyes, I might see him or her here place a gun inside his or her mouth, he or she standing in a bright light in their white tiled bathroom that looks so much like mine, a room that does not exist at all in shape or form, but instead is a potential room,31 one that could appear in any house in any evening more or less, a room with one long mirror and a door, yes that’s how it fits there, I’ll see this person’s versions of his or her eyes both in their head and in the mirror go huge seeing themselves with the gun aimed, I’ll hear a click and then a boom, the sound inside my head enough some ways perhaps to shake me, reflected in my flesh like something crawls — then in the image of the false room I’ll see the quick blood32 come out the backside of his or her skull hair33 shooting from his or her body in a plume, the body dropping to the tile in silence, slo-mo — because my head can, like a movie, disrupt time — more blood washing thick along the tile of the false bathroom and the mirror and maybe sloshing up to cover at the lens of how I see, and the room around me in my own house might be far gone enough at this point that I will forget that I am there completely, but still in my body, like entering a room that is not sleeping,34