Sleep

    I flipped my bedroom light off at 11:00 PM yesterday, shut my laptop, and let Parks and Recreation on Netflix play off of my desktop computer.  I turned my head away from the screen, closing my eyes, gradually, increasingly ignoring Nick Offerman's satirical comments.  At one point, the noise faded–no, it didn’t–indicating to me that I was falling asleep.  I was proud of myself; I usually am for managing to fall asleep.  It’s difficult to relax sometimes.  Knowing that I have to wake up the next day at 6:00 AM–maybe later, but not too late, and I have to worry about that too–start classes not two hours later, interact with others, complete a variety of essays reports & assignments before deadlines, rehearse for a musical at a playhouse twenty minutes from here, simply knowing that those things are coming is enough to proffer a moderate, stressful annoyance.  Of course, it could be worse; I could be sitting in immovable traffic just as an angry driver walks up to my car with a pipe, capable of and intending to assault me.  Imagine that pipe were a knife, the driver was C. Thomas Howell, and you were alone on a dark road, about to become another one of the Reaper’s multiply-stabbed victims.  Or, perhaps, I could be an infant both without my mom around and near a jackhammer.  There are many possibilities, many of which unrealistic, some impossible, some simple yet scary fantasies, but the thought can provoke as much anxiety as anticipating any real source of stress.  

    Or I could open my eyes and watch more of Amy.  But I can’t turn my head, and I can’t open my eyes.  I could open them, but I don’t want to.  I did, and I will, but I don’t, and I won’t, so I can’t.  My limbs are also paralyzed; I can’t lift them, but I feel like I’m typing right now.  This happens way too much; I wonder if I’ll be able to move this time, I’d like to finally conquer the paralysis.  It’s hopeless, though, most of the motor neurons below my neck have been strongly inhibited starting from the third and fourth stages of sleep, when my brain’s neuronal circuits all oscillate in almost perfect synchrony, slowly, powerfully, at a single cycle each second, varying from up states of ubiquitous activity, almost everything firing all at once, to down states, when absolutely nothing is firing.  Everything to nothing.  Nightmares could happen right now, though they aren’t necessary; it’s just everything and nothing.  If nothing is happening anywhere in my brain, then the astrocytes–the star-shaped cells that hold up the neurons and provide them with energy in the form of glycogen–can rest briefly, periodically, and replenish its glycogen levels.  Those levels drop each time an astrocyte’s neurons fire.  Every time I think, feel, remember, watch, stare, daydream, anything, if my neurons fire then they use energy, and each time they use energy my brain also secretes adenosine into itself. 
   
    The adenosine accumulated somewhat slowly yesterday.  I didn’t do much.  Nothing particularly strenuous except for watching my C# course videos.  I watched about ten consecutively, actively engaged in the lessons and following along, and I fell asleep for an hour or two.  Most of the adenosine that built up during my learning broke down during that nap.  It accumulated again afterward as the day grew darker, Parks and Rec played, I had dinner, played Minecraft, thought, imagined, imagined becoming a famous game designer.  I could walk to up someone and ask them if they’d ever heard of the game Zeitgeist, and they’d say yes, and I’d say that I wrote it.  I could ask if they’d read Muse, and they’d say yes, or no but they’d heard of it, and I’d tell them that I wrote that.  Someday that’ll be true, and that’ll happen, but for now I can’t move my arms or legs.  I want to raise my head, and there’s nothing else I want more than that.  I accidentally open my eyes, though.  It’s disappointing, but before I close them, I open them again, look up, and Parks and Rec is playing off of my laptop instead of my desktop.  It was closed, though, and I knew it was closed even while it was open.  If someone were to walk into my room at that moment, they’d have found me sleeping, but if I was awoken, then I’d have definitively denied being asleep.  I’d have told them I was resting my eyes for a few seconds, as some patients in hospitals do when nurses give them pills to swallow at midnight.  There’s a lot of destructive interference in a brain when its corresponding body is asleep but mostly aware of its surroundings, and aware of its awareness.  On average, the various neuronal circuits are operating quickly, at a frequency that’s known as theta-level activity.  Alpha and beta neuronal activity happens during wakefulness: the former when the brain isn’t doing anything particularly intensive, the latter when it is. 

    Theta is also known as stage 1 sleep.  After about 10-15 minutes, stage two begins, during which periods of clustered, synchronous yet dissonant activity occur throughout the brain.  These clusters are sleep spindles, and foreshadow a slower-wave sleep, as do the K complexes that also betide the stage two sleeper.  His brain’s activity occasionally spikes, all the circuits interfering with each other constructively.  The amplitude of a wave of a K complex is greater than that of the rest of the regular, destructive theta activity.  Then stage 3 begins, and stage 4 soon after.  Delta-level activity; much slower.  Nightmares can happen here, sometimes.  Everything and nothing.  During the everything, the periods of absolute activity, the current that passes through the different neuronal circuits is regular enough to encourage electrical coupling enough to consolidate explicit memories.  Memories of the color of my brown desk, or of the desktop that should be playing Netflix and not the laptop that’s suddenly become impossibly close to my face. 

    What if I suddenly flew away?  It wouldn’t matter; once I’m at the delta-level sleep stages, before REM sleep even begins, my prefrontal cortex has also become strongly inhibited.  During its active times, it distinguish illusion from reality as best it can, it suppresses irrational behavior, interprets social situations and regulates decisions through the scope of long-term plans and social contracts and norms.  It keeps track of the passage of time.  But now it’s stopped, and if I heard the name Muse then I’d wonder whether I’ve ever heard any songs by Muse.  If I heard Zeitgeist,  I’d remember arguing with my old history teacher about creationism.  If I started flying, I’d fly into a mall, totally beyond my control, and buy the entire building.  I’d make a reasonable revenue.  There would be sources of stress, but C. Thomas Howell wouldn’t come to murder me, and I wouldn’t be a baby near a jackhammer.  I might lose my hair, but I’ve already lost it, or am about to, or it won’t go anywhere.  If I were awake and about to be murdered, my hypothalamus would stimulate the adrenal gland, which would secrete cortisol and begin to trigger the sympathetic nervous system’s response to my imminent demise.  My blood pressure and heart rate would increase dramatically, I’d be alert, scared, and feeling stressed.  The same would happen if I were that baby; the same would happen if I dreamt it all.  If I read, from a book, a quote from 1982 by a fellow called Melges, “the dreamer often has no feeling of striving for long-term goals but rather is carried along by the flow of time by circumstances that crop up in an unpredictable way,” and felt it were creepy, I would experience the same emotion if I had dreamt reading it.  A dream is nothing more than a set of auditory, motor, tactile, visual, sensory hallucinations that doesn’t even have to occur while your eyes are moving rapidly.  But it’s a hallucination in which you have no ability to understand the world around you.  There is no difference between fantasy-fantasy and fantasy-reality, no real flow of time, no logic, no causality, and none of that even matters to you.  You, the dreamer, are dust in the wind; dust doesn’t care that it’s dust, and when you dream, during slow-wave sleep, REM sleep, or even during the day, neither do you.  Slow-wave dreams and REM dreams are also storylike in format as you experience it and if you were to report it, which indicates that what you experienced in that dream made complete sense to you.  You may even recall having been interested in a particular goal; I am typically interested in attempting to move my body despite the self-inflicted paralysis. 

    Has this post confused you?  Have you followed it with relative ease?  Has your day been a stressful one?  Was there any reason that corresponded to the difficulty, or had a variety of problems presented themselves to you simultaneously?  The disorder in the universe is everywhere, yet we arrange it into patterns and reason daily and regularly.  Dreams more obviously reflect that very process, and you are as conscious during them as you have been reading this.  I suppose that raises an important question: do you need to wake up right now?