Insomniac Hallucinations (Even the Booze Doesn't Help)

No, that's not strictly true. It's not that I haven't slept at all. I'll fall asleep just fine. I drift away in a matter of minutes while listening to, for lack of anything else, the latest James Lee Burke novel. But not long afterward, my eyes will open again, just fall open for no reason, and there I'll be, staring, mind racing, for hours, until the alarms go off and it's time to go to work again.

Three days now. My timing's way off, as are most all my perceptions. Abrupt, sharp noises make me scream. Anything louder than a whisper makes me wince. What I can see is all quavery and fuzzy, like looking through a sheet of gauze on a clothesline. The visual and auditory hallucinations haven't started yet, but when they do arrive, I won't be surprised.

I've seen enough movies featuring insomniacs to know that nothing good can come of it. Taxi Driver, Into the Night, the mostly execrable Fight Club. Insomniacs always end up killing people or setting fires or stumbling into international plots of one kind or another. And while all those things might be interesting and fun, I'm simply not in the mood right now.

I don't do well on little sleep. It wasn't always the case?back in the crystal meth days, I could go three, four days without even thinking about it. In the last few years, however, I'm finding that I require more and more sleep every night. A ridiculous amount of sleep. Ten, 11 hours or more when I can grab it. When I can't, I slowly become more and more dissolute, more and more insane?more so than usual, even. I stop changing my clothes and brushing my hair. It just never occurs to me.

On Monday night, I was awakened by a long series of phone calls and hang-ups. When they finally stopped, sometime around 3:30, the cats started going at it. After they were all scrapped out, the car alarm erupted outside my window. When that finally stopped, I was finished, myself. All thought of any more sleep that night was banished. I tried listening to more of the Burke tape. I tried to convince one of the beasts to climb up on the bed and sleep on my hand (which, for some reason, usually seems to work), but they wanted nothing to do with it. So I lay there, thinking bad thoughts. Paranoid, and getting worse.

Following work the next day, Morgan and I met up with a few friends at the tavern. The evening wore on, as they say, and we stayed locked at that table for far too long. Those pints kept appearing on the table?what choice did we have? I'll be sick tomorrow, I remember thinking, but at least I'll sleep.

And sure enough, after Morgan dropped me off at the station, I made it downstairs to the platform all right, only to fall asleep on the train back to Brooklyn. Seems I can sleep on trains just fine?just not in my own bed. When I snapped awake?with some luck, just as my stop was being announced?I briefly contemplated staying on the train for the rest of the night. From Coney Island to Queens and back again. I thought I might be able to get some sleep that way.

But instead I went home, and lay in bed staring again, sweating the beer out of me, keeping track as best I could of the steadily increasing pressure and pain inside my skull.

I made it slowly back into work the next morning shaky, woozy, puffy-eyed and generally unpleasant to be around. Things move much more slowly this way. And strangely. The pain in my head faded gradually as I walked. Pedestrians moved slowly around me. The cars crawled along, all of them, it seems, on mute.

I knew the hallucinations couldn't be too far away. Thing about the exhaustion hallucinations is, they're always the same. It was something I first noticed maybe a year and a half ago. I don't see patterns in carpets moving, I don't see monsters coming out of the walls (though I do see both under different circumstances). Those would actually be preferable to what takes place. No, what happens in my case is that nearly every face around me?familiar or strange, male or female, in the office or in the street, goes blank, then begins to shift around, the individual features moving and sliding, transmogrifying, until they finally resolve themselves, replacing the face that used to be there with Steven Spielberg's. Every face I see becomes Steven Spielberg. Nothing else changes. The bodies don't change. The voices remain the same. Women remain women. But everyone looks like Steven Spielberg.

I don't know why this is. I mean, I'm not particularly obsessed with him in one way or another. Don't normally pay much of any attention to him at all. But maybe my brain is trying to tell me something. Something I would rather not know.

A new development during these past few insomnial nights has been the arrival of the waking nightmares. They differ from my usual, unconscious nightmares in that they actually terrify me. And they differ from the nightmares of whatever form I encounter whenever I'm conscious in that, well, they terrify me. The horrors of living and the horrors that visit me when I sleep are simply things that I've come to accept, even cherish. These half-and-half horrors, though, are something else.

I was lying there Monday night, mind spinning, obsessing on phrases or pictures or scenes, repeating them, condensing them, unable to get past them. I was reviewing all the jobs I've had when I stopped at the second one?the clerk position in the shopping mall chain bookstore when I was in high school.

There was a long passageway that extended behind and between each store in the complex, generally for use by the mall's maintenance staff. Part of my job involved putting the day's garbage in the dumpster behind the store every night.

The hallways were long, unmarked and bright white. Lit with banks of fluorescent lights. Even back then?or, more accurately, specifically back then?in the early 80s, those corridors always gave me the willies. I imagine it had something to do with Dawn of the Dead?a movie I saw eight times during its original theatrical release?which had come out just a year before I started working at the mall.

As I lay there thinking about those endless white corridors, I could see the dark figure in the distance, filling the passageway, heading toward me, fast. It wasn't a zombie. Zombies I know how to take care of. I didn't know what this was?all I knew, as I lay there in the safety of my Brooklyn apartment, was that it was human in shape, and was moving too quickly to guarantee my escape.

Fully aware that I was in Brooklyn, not a shopping mall, my body still went rigid, and everything went numb and tingly. It was a very physical reaction to stark terror in response to a thought. On the bright side, I suppose, I didn't shit myself.

I continued lying there as the wave passed, thinking, "Well, that was odd."

As the nights and days have passed, more and more things have been frightening me, likewise for no reason. And I'm afraid of what'll happen?will my mind simply snap? Will I go on that bloody spree??at the moment when everyone turns into Steven Spielberg.

These past days, I've found myself communicating with other people, in other parts of the country, and I'm finding that they haven't been able to sleep, either. Not all of them, but quite a few. It feels almost like a mild epidemic. Maybe it's a moon thing?there was a full moon one of those nights. Or a seasonal thing (I've been affected much too powerfully by changes in the weather this year).

Or maybe it's all that mosquito spraying. Or a growing national trend toward psychosis.

Maybe we're approaching a day when half the population or more will be choosing to spend the rest of their lives bleary-eyed, cranky and delirious.

As I sit here, my legs are going numb. My eyes can no longer focus on what little they have to focus on. Fingers can't find the keys no more. Time to get a drink, or two, or more, and sleep, sleep, sleep forever.