Unchained Exhaustion

I've written about sleep in the past, and come at the matter from different angles. Much of it has been the difficulty of making it happen. Dreams have been the next biggest focus. All that presumes that an attempt at sleep is even possible. Whether it is or isn't, there are those times when I at least don't make that attempt, and one runs through the stages of bodily breakdown and failure. A recent all-nighter (mercifully rare these days) got me thinking about all this. I have read some about what happens in extreme cases. One can hold out for less time without sleep than either food or water, or so I understand. As a boy I recall musing on my father's warning about what would become of me should I fail to sleep. He unwisely chose the risk of frightening hallucinations as an attempt to set me straight. I wondered about what they might look like. Given that I was and remain rather captive to my imagination, the prospect seemed rather appealing, though I never experienced such things.

Sleep deprivation and perhaps the hallucinations that can come from it inspired 'A Nightmare On Elm Street'. There was this man sometime in the late 70s or early 80s who suddenly became terrified to sleep. He spoke of nightmares, and consumed prodigious amounts of stimulants to forestall sleep. One day, he finally crashed, and his relieved family put him to bed, where he died. It seems only natural that filmmakers would have been so interested as to develop a film from that, as I have myself seen some less dramatic but nonetheless interesting things, facilitated by my work in films. It may be that the persistent use of legal stimulants renders my observations invalid as science, but you ought to enjoy them.

 It's really rather fascinating to watch transpire. Of course, one starts out fresh, or at least as fresh as regularly sleeping five hours a night allows one to be. One starts slowing down and making more mistakes. Irritability grows and disagreements flare up. The capacity of even the strong-willed to resist wears down. You'll see someone close their eyes for just more than a moment, then snap them open and shake their head. This would appear to be nearly the end, except that it's about this time that one comes to my favorite part. You sort of have recovered from the risk of falling asleep, but in reality are entering the realm of most severe breakdown. It often happens on a film set just as the last shot has been completed and the time has come to record what's called presence or room tone. For the unfamiliar, suffice it to say that you must record what the place you're filming in sounds like when everyone is there but not making noise. It's infuriating, because this is the one time when no one can be quiet.

What happens is that people then get the giggles, and it is absolutely not motivated by anything seen or heard by the giggler. They are just getting so tired they're becoming giddy. Something similar happens in oxygen deprivation, I gather. Before very long after you get to that point, you crash. I don't think the body just does things for no reason. They make less sense the more we are able to take over for instinct with conscious decisions, but they make as much sense as religiously-derived dietary restrictions when one considers the context of both. I wonder if that progression during sleep deprivation is what remains from nature's ancient way of helping you check out mentally when you're about to die. Rest assured, however: however I'm destined to go out, it certainly won't be sleep deprivation.