Blog Moved

Alas, the time has come to part with the ye blogger blog. I've moved my weblog to www.timsoo.com. While Blogger has been a fantastic tool, it lacked some of the functionality and flexibility for which I was searching.

See you at the new site.

Tim Soo

Insomnia

I used to fear sleep.

It's been so long that I had almost forgotten how I fell into these unusual habits in the first place.

As a kid, I constantly maintained the belief that our home would be broken into. At night, I lay awake listening for any sound, any clue that someone might be prying a window or sneaking past our front door. Sounds of my parents walking around or talking after my supposed bedtime were torturous to a young child who had little way of distinguishing those sounds from those of a more evil intent. I soon learned to stay up until every else had fallen asleep.

Even after my conscious self had grown up enough to know not to delve so deeply into those concerns night after night, my subconscious self still drew upon irrational fear. With age, the fears no longer simply embodied the robber-in-the-house scene. Rather, the realm of sleep became a location where all my irrational fears of the day were free to reign. Some were more of the impossible sort - end of the world, wilderness attacks, foreign capture, torture. Others were very possible - loss of loved ones, loss of connection, failure, rejection.

The recurrences of the nightmares were self-propagating. When I began to fear a scenario, my subconscious ensured that that would be the subject of that night's dream. The more I did not want to dream of a particular topic, the more often it came. It was the never ending struggling of "trying to not think of something." Anyone who has tried knows that this is an impossible feat. Thinking about not thinking was hardly a viable solution.

At first, this struggle panned out in less than healthy habits. I naturally began staying awake to the point of utter exhaustion -- when you fall asleep before your head even hits the pillow. In these instances, there is little energy to even think before sleep. In addition, deeper sleep tends to avoid dreaming. With this approach, I was safe.

I always wonder how much that rationale played into my current aversion to regular sleep hours.

That solution, however, was temporary. The world did not operate on a clock that would allow for a 30-hour day (the number of hours required to employ the previous method).

By this time, I was in elementary school and was old enough to understand and attempt various of the classic methods of sleep.

• Counting sheep? -- ha! -- After reaching 3289 blasted sheep, I realized that such a method was fruitless; my mind simply did not stop running.
• Meditation. This method worked to some extent. Following a common method of self-meditation, I focused on a color (sky blue was my choice) as hard as I could. By focusing on the simple, I would drive out other thoughts, hopefully long enough for me to fall asleep. But that hope was poorly founded. The effort of focusing often kept me awake until my thoughts once again drifted back to the original issue.
• Music, of both the Disney and classic genres. I blame this strategy for two things: 1.) Disney lyrics, nowadays, are the only lyrics I remember. 2.) I never stay awake during classical concerts of any sort. True, I had learned to condition myself to attribute a soporific effect with these genres, but the tunes were never engaging enough. That is, the music did not distract sufficiently to avoid other thought. My mind would continue wandering, having turned the background music into white noise.

Around fifth grade (yes, all of these methods were attempted before the age of ten), I tried a more active approach -- lucid dreaming. For those who are not familiar with the concept, lucid dreaming, in short, is knowing you are dreaming and better yet, learning to control it.

The first time I dreamt lucidly was purely by accident. In the dream, I had returned to the age of a toddler and was walking around in my first home on Ridgecrest road, a house we had moved from before I had turned five. (It's amazing what the mind can recall with such clarity.) The dream was simple. My mother, standing near the railing, was vacuuming. I looked at my surroundings, then at myself, and suddenly realized my actual age. I wasn't three. I was ten. Logically I reasoned I must be dreaming. Running over to my mother, I shared this fantastic revelation -- I was dreaming and knew it! Of course, the dream version of my mom played along with my subconscious, ensuring toddler Tim that I was being silly and could not be dreaming. But no matter, I had lucidly dreamt.

From that moment on, lucid dreaming became one of my major attacks on insomnia. (I still tended to alternate approaches from night to night, as none were particularly effective.) If I could completely control the dream, then I could control the topic, the scenario. It would be my own personal matrix. Through trial and error, I developed a method for lucid dreaming, though it required considerable effort. Before sleep, I would incessantly repeat the thought to myself "You are about to dream." When the body becomes lethargic enough, the subconscious becomes more available to the world. It is in these moments that one can actually communicate with your subconscious self (i.e. the whole concept behind hypnotism). My method was not 100%, but when it worked, it was a New World haven.

The scenario was always preset by my brain, out of my conscious control. But once in, I could steer the blissful 5 minutes of early REM in any direction that I pleased. At first, I created carnivals on the backs of trucks, made video games into reality, and attempted whatever randomnity my mind could produce that evening. Soon, though, the dreams became only of one topic: flying. --- (aside) As I type these words, I am finding more and more of my current self seems to be molded by this battle against insomnia. --- No matter what scene my brain placed me into, I looked up and began to fly. There was a clear method involved with flight, however. It was not a simple Superman approach (my mind, apparently, had decided that would be too easy). Rather, flying in my dreams required learning how to ride subtle currents in the air (though not necessarily currents of wind). Certain motions propelled upwards, others downward, and some movements installed speed into my motion. It's funny, to this day, the method of flight still has not changed.

Unfortunately, this technique, too, was not foolproof. Often the excitement itself prevented sleep, or the constant effort of constant repetition in order to begin a lucid dream was too tiring to maintain. So once again, I was left to a combination of all these techniques with an aptitude for avoiding sleep. Exhaustion, it seemed, was still one of the best methods.

In high school, I was constantly exhausted. No problem falling asleep there. In addition, my life at that time contained endless change (extracurriculars, camps, courses, etc); the passive filtering of the steady stream was enough to distract my wandering mind. Of course, I would at times return to employing various methods of avoiding disastrous dreams when necessary, but for the most part, life was too fast to worry.

In college, I made a discovery. Most of my close friends now do not know me without the Friends theme song playing in the background. Yes, Friends the TV show. Today, I can quote most every episode with a frightening level of detail. What was the discovery? I figured out that speech, more specifically background dialogue, was the perfect balance of distraction. New shows, or rather episodes I had not seen, did not fit this category as my mind would strain to follow the plot. But episodes I had seen and were familiar with, these, I could allow to "wandering" portion of my brain to focus on, allowing a quick and easy sleep.

I soon learned that this approach also worked with the more menial tasks in studying and homework, although assignments that required actual thought demanded my full attention.

Which brings me to today, or last night -- er, this morning -- rather. I woke up and attempted to fall back asleep from a relatively awoken state without background distraction. My mind began to wander, back through those same paths of fear it had once taken when I was a child. It was that twang of familiarity that jolted me awake. I had nearly forgotten that long ago, before I learned how to distract my mind, that I used to fear sleep.