don el don

"Don El Don" is the name I have given to the strange nighttime phenomenon that I have been experiencing lately during my spells of sleeplessness. On my nighttime mind are the standard stimulants: anxiety about my halted progress toward unclear life goals, regrets for mistakes long made, and the overall unpleasant feeling that my life can best be described in metaphor as a sack of unshelled walnuts spilled out on the ground. I'm coming to the end of my year in suspension, preparing for some transitions, etc. Only more alarming than being glum like this is the regularity with which I write about being glum like this. That's a different post, however.

Anyway, I haven't been sleeping very well since May 2008. The insomnia comes and goes, but this month has been particularly bad. Now, when I can't sleep, I lie in bed, breathing shallow, with my heartbeat vibrating at high speed in my ears. In the daytime, I avoid light. I feel drunk and I cause accidents. Yesterday I accidentally upended a pint of blueberries on my desk, and they went bumping off in every direction; today, the same with a baggie of pecans. The physiological effects of sleeplessness are terrifying. I feel like I might die now, or die young.

Late, late at night, Don El Don starts up. I must be lying in the dark with my eyes closed, and my fatigue has to have gone from standard sleepiness to unhappy weariness to hyperactive panic exhaustion. Some set of letters, often "Don El Don," will appear in my vision, and then I see an unending succession of words. They aren't nonsense letters, like "xoqtudff," but are English words, usually arranged in grammatical sentences, but the combination of the words does not parse (e.g. "billiard bottom conjure"). Actually, the phrases are a lot like the nonsense phrases in my spam emails, which I posted about below.

The words don't just scroll across my vision like a ticker. Instead, I am in a big, undefined space with many different plaques and signs of different shapes, fonts, and orientations affixed to faraway walls. It is as if I am behind a camera with an intense telephoto lens and a mind of its own, and I just watch passively as it zooms from spot to spot. The zoom looks like how eagle vision is depicted on-screen: sudden extreme focus on a tiny patch of space. If I'm not tired enough, the words are too fuzzy to read. It is only when I am really, really tired that the words come into focus. As soon as I read the words on one plaque, my vision focuses on another, and then another, and then another.

When I try to do Don El Don when I am fully awake - right now, for example - my mind works differently. First I think of a word, and then I see it (and its neighbors) in my vision; it feels like the conscious retrieval of information I already know. But when Don El Don comes in the night, it feels like some outside source is supplying the words to me. All I do is passively absorb new information. It comes in a liminal stage of half-sleep where I am aware that the words are creating weird juxtapositions, but if I were to read aloud or try to document them, the words would disappear as I became fully awake. I wish I could remember even one-thousandth of the words I see at night, but, like most of my dreams, they fly through my mind without ever setting a faint footprint into my memory.

It's not really something that concerns me or feels unpleasant. Sometimes Don El Don leads to the kind of distraction required for sleep, like what people try to feel when they count sheep or count down from a hundred. Those times are nice. Sometimes it goes on for hours. Those times are less nice, but at least I feel creative, or possessed, or just blessed by weirdness. If it's a neurological problem, oh, who cares? I have a nighttime companion in Don El Don.