After many sleepless nights in front of my television, I’ve grown to crave human brains. Now, many would attribute my undying hunger for the grey matter of my peers to my inability to sleep.
As stated in “Fight Club,” an insomniac is neither awake nor asleep. In this unholy purgatory, reality becomes harder to stomach. Keeping these unorthodox hours allows me to freely flirt with 3 and 7 a.m. without burning the bridges I’ve crossed with the daytime.
This schedule’s conception began when I was encouraged to start doing content analysis in the media, and has since developed into a full-fledged addiction, with dramatic physical withdrawal symptoms. Pairing this communications addiction to my newfound correspondence with staff reporter Kelsey Lester-Perry for a literary project has rendered my biological clock as a time bomb, with its detonation on an indefinite hiatus.
Now, any time after midnight, I’m either writing or watching Fox News, reinforcing the fact that any addiction is a one-way ticket straight to the gutter. In order to purge the unethical conniving nature of Fox News from my blood, I balance it with the six o’clock news on ABC. The fact that the information on this “fair and balanced” media outlet is passable as any form of truth is a terrifying, yet fascinating spectacle.
At times, the self-induced sleep deprivation really does feel like a horrendous chore. It may seem irrational to live an alternative lifestyle such as this, but it’s become an experiment, using myself as the control and variable, and my creative output as the data. Thus far, the experiment has been successful. The drastic reduction of my waking hours has only lead me to conclude that in any given day, eight hours of sleep is simply way too much.
Dreaming is equally as intriguing when running on fumes. The dreams are short, concise and serve a purpose. They tend to be reminders of concepts that I’ve catalogued and left on the backburner of my subconscious. This allows for me to revisit the ideas I’ve disregarded in favor of the most pertinent. In a field where timeliness is a decisive factor, I’ve trained myself to prioritize thoughts in a hierarchy of importance, and organization has been a blessing and curse.
Although longevity should be a primary concern, it has been buried deep under many layers of drive towards streamlining the creative process, even if it means compromising the solidarity of my sleep cycle. Despite all the negative effects this bout of insomnia has brought on, at least I’m learning. Through the content analysis, I’ve come to a greater understanding of ethics in the media. I’ve also seen the effects of insomnia, and how sometimes the best work is done under the most stress, as well as the worst. And even if this experiment proves to be a failure, I can at least say with confidence that I didn’t waste my time. It could always be worse.
