strip mining for whimsy

close your eyes.

I know it's time to go to bed when I start seeing things.
It usually starts to happen after about twenty hours without sleep. I start seeing little shadows in the corner of my vision. By thirty-six hours I start seeing faces looking in the windows at me-- they disappear when I look directly at them. Seventy-two hours brings daylight hallucinations: I see small objects that aren't really there. When I was eighteen I once went for about five days on three hours of sleep. I knew I'd passed some kind of low water mark when I was on my way to class and the walkway in front of me was covered in dead rabbits.
I paused.
Looked around.
People were walking through the rabbits.
"Ah-hah," I thought. "Hallucinations: Evergreen students would never tread so casually on the mangled remains of their lapin brethren."
It was the only time I ever hallucinated something that didn't just disappear when I looked directly at it.
Until I was about twenty-five I spent so much time sleep deprived that I actually didn't notice the connection between sleep deprivation and some of my squirrelier behavior. Then, at some point I was on the phone with my mom, who actually was crazy, and she asked how things were going. I told her I was getting worried that I had the family curse (both my mom and her mom were diagnosed schizophrenics, as was my dad). She asked me about my symptoms and when I ran them down she asked if I was sleeping much.
"More than usual," I said, "Five or six hours a night."
"Ah," she said. "There you go."
"What's that got to do with anything?" I asked.
"Hah!" she said.
"What? Does not sleeping mess with you?"
"Stop. You're killing me."
Apparently the reason all this isn't common knowledge is that most people actually can't stay up for five days in a row without the help of powerful drugs.
Who knew?
And of course, in my case, it was kind of a self-perpetuating cycle, as demonstrated by this typical conversation between myself and my college girlfriend:
Girlfriend: Wow, I'm really tired. I'm going to bed. You coming?
Josh: No, I'm gonna stay up a while longer.
GF: You sure?
J: Yeah.
GF: Okay. Mind if I ask why?
J: Not at all: if I lie down the invisible snakes will eat me alive.
GF: Invisible snakes?
J: Yeah, they're-- holy shit! There goes one now!!! [Josh lunges across the room and starts beating the fern with a pancake spatula.] ...Fuck. Where'd it go? Jesus, did you see the size of that fuck'n thing?
GF: Um. No.
J: Ah-hah! I have the same problem. Hence the "invisible" thing.
GF: Interesting. Say, um, do you think I could get that spare key to my dorm back from you? I, uh, lost mine.

Of course, coffee makes all this much worse.
Which is, I imagine, why the invisible flying man who only casts a shadow followed me home from Bauhaus tonight.