Hypnos teased
One of my favorite winter activities is, on a really cold day, to get onto the bus for the ride home. As a rule, the colder the outside of the bus, the hotter and drier the inside. (This is an objective phenomenon, as measured by my Calecotronic Portable Thermohygrometer, and not just psychological relativism.) On such earlydark days, the busride is like a herkyjerky liedown in front of a fireplace (but more upright-seated). And inevitably, the dry heat lulls me toward sleep while the knowledge that I've got to get off the damn bus at some point pulls me back awake. The net result is the sort of dreamy dazed doze that I've mostly only experienced while curled fetally up in a library chair.
Dry heat, dry eyes, sleepytime and drool on the armchair.
A hynagogic state is the clinical term, and a fine term it is. Pseudodreams aside, my favorite thing about this state is the combination of peace and time dilation. Five minutes balloon into an hour, like LSD without the tweakiness or other side effects. I could almost stand to live forever like that, and the best thing is that it wouldn't even take forever to do it because of the expansion of time. Of course I jest; any fraction of infinity is still infinity. Alas.
Hypnagogia is much better than hynopompic states. Coming back awake from sleep, with one's last memories being random scraps of dreams, one doesn't tend to get the same peaceful ease as with the transition into sleep.
As it happens, I would just as well take either one: They're about equally difficult for me to attain. Whatever analog to Cerberos may guard that Lesser Divide, between the lands of the quick and the asleep, does not let me go gentle into either that good night or the next good morning. If I'm awake, the odds are that I won't be able to sleep, and vice versa. After the past several nights that I haven't been able to sleep, I came to accept this. I would rather not sleep at all than oversleep. What with being almost thirty and supposedly supposed to be like a grownup and, you know, stuff and junk.
One of these days I'm just going to ride an on-campus bus from one end of UNH to the other, again and again in great circles of restful not-quite-sleep. And I will get off, dazed, blinking, and with mid-evening morning-breath, and I will probably regret having wasted three or five hours. But I'll have enjoyed it, and will look back on it nostalgically on many future sleepless nights.
Dry heat, dry eyes, sleepytime and drool on the armchair.
A hynagogic state is the clinical term, and a fine term it is. Pseudodreams aside, my favorite thing about this state is the combination of peace and time dilation. Five minutes balloon into an hour, like LSD without the tweakiness or other side effects. I could almost stand to live forever like that, and the best thing is that it wouldn't even take forever to do it because of the expansion of time. Of course I jest; any fraction of infinity is still infinity. Alas.
Hypnagogia is much better than hynopompic states. Coming back awake from sleep, with one's last memories being random scraps of dreams, one doesn't tend to get the same peaceful ease as with the transition into sleep.
As it happens, I would just as well take either one: They're about equally difficult for me to attain. Whatever analog to Cerberos may guard that Lesser Divide, between the lands of the quick and the asleep, does not let me go gentle into either that good night or the next good morning. If I'm awake, the odds are that I won't be able to sleep, and vice versa. After the past several nights that I haven't been able to sleep, I came to accept this. I would rather not sleep at all than oversleep. What with being almost thirty and supposedly supposed to be like a grownup and, you know, stuff and junk.
One of these days I'm just going to ride an on-campus bus from one end of UNH to the other, again and again in great circles of restful not-quite-sleep. And I will get off, dazed, blinking, and with mid-evening morning-breath, and I will probably regret having wasted three or five hours. But I'll have enjoyed it, and will look back on it nostalgically on many future sleepless nights.
1 Comments:
riding the bus to work or school, into and out of downtown, and across town, and etc, i noticed this perfectly sleepy nature of the city bus myself. i developed the idea to open a hotel chain consisting of one or more of these: a group of buses running eternally in a lazy circle around town, or on treadmills in a geographically stationary but constant state of motion.
it's the ambient engine white noise and the largely gentle movement that does it, combined with the warm womb-like feeling.
you could get onto such a bus, enter a compartment not unlike the sleeping car of a train but consisting of seats, and sit and watch the city go by and not care about anything for as long as you choose.
the 'tour' version that circles endlessly through town would probably be quite popular with non-natives, providing a way to get their bearings and some zen-like rest in a strange and foreign place.
Post a Comment
<< Home