I've gotten myself hallucinating, just like the guy who crossed the road without realising that he was in fact following what now has started to become a good friend of ours, the chicken.
I don't know what this fictional character did to hallucinate as much as to not see a chicken crossing a road. But i know exactly what I did- I didn't get good sleep for 12 days.
Enjoying the silence and calamity of the night is what drugs, alcohol or religion is to others. Allnighters are a complex, escapist and a drop of emotional sanity.It is relaxing just as much as it is an active process of reflection and creation. The beauty of the all-nighter hides in its overlooked simplicity: like a radio switched from short to long waves, cathartic exhaustion creates thought, even certainty in the most simple way: tiredness changes our perception, and what we take for axiomatically true becomes a theorem, instead. Doubt is a source of progress, and I tome this doubt is priceless.
How do we know what we think we know?
A good friend of mine, and a former teacher, told me just before I entered my senior year of highschool, that no matter how much work there is piling up, no matter how important this work is, one has to always find the time for oneself and for one's mental sanity. If you feel like playing guitar for 30 mins, then damn!, play that guitar in between writing the introduction and the body of that essay due tomorrow. This advice maybe actually saved my arrogant butt from a break down, now that I look back at that year- it was extremely stressful, with major changes which managed to provoke full-blown panic attacks; a half-wrecked relationship I had to recuscitate, despite my partner having signed a DNR; family issues... and among all that, I pulled myself together, do my work and do it well, and to even play that guitar...
If you'd like, imagine you're a contractor and you've been paid to build a two-storey hotel. You estimate, though, that the money you have will only suffice to build the ground floor properly, or you can lay down the basics of both floors, without leading it to a presentable, sellable finish. What do you do? You build the ground floor, open the hotel and after a while you have made enough profit to build the second floor, then expanding the business for even greater profit.
If that seems like the logical conclusion, why is it that so few times we actually take the time to first fix ourselves, before we move on to externally-induced problems?
I've set this space up as an expression of my arrogance and self-centeredness, so I'll indulge a bite more- all-nighters are my time to be left the fuck alone, to be quiet. This is no brag about my pseudo-intellectual moments of reaching truths that others miss out on when snoozing at 4 am. I don't claim to get to major explanations of why life is this way, who God is, or how we know what we think we know. Mind you, there is no God as far as I am concerned, so I am saved a lot of time there. Instead, I get to my little conclusions: I should've listened more, rather than speak so much to that fella at the party yesterday, so I make a decision to try to listen to people more often. I should be calmer and more grateful when it comes to my family. And, damn, I shouldn't have had that yoghurt after dinner, i'm so full now. Please. Dieting is for insecure girls with body image problems. But I don't like feeling so full. I feel like watching a good movie. Nothing overly dramatic, no politics/war movies. Just a simple film that I will remember and tell people about.
Where do hallucinations come in, then? I started the article with hallucinations. I get hallucinations when I don't sleep for more than 3 nights. And, damn if they aren't fun in a twisted way. I have more time to appreciate the world in its details, outside the inertia of the mundane. Yet it is not extraordinary to talk to my friends on the other side of the big pond, or getting high on caffeine, see the sun rise, dance, paint my nails, read a book, all that jazz. All That Jazz is an overstated movie, by the way. Guess how I know?
So, this is what I do that gets me smiling for no reason and makes you wonder what I might be up to. What do you do?
