I’m so fucking tired. Not of anything in particular (though I have plenty of that, too), but literally so. fucking. tired. For the past three days, I’ve been dozing on and off throughout the evenings, then crashing hard during the night. Yet, I couldn’t sleep for more than five hours or so. I’m currently watching a Try Guys video on driving while sleep-deprived (early access for being a Patreon member of a certain tier. They’re doing a series driving while ______, and this one is where they had a twenty-four hour stay awake party, then drive on a contained course. It’s well known that driving while sleep-deprived is as bad if not worse than driving while drunk. The doctor in the video said that it was ideal for people to get 7 – 8 hours of sleep a night, and I had to laugh, albeit bitterly. I’ve gotten up to 6 hours, but 7 hours seems like an impossible dreams. I used to get 4 hours a night on a good night, but I’m up to 6. Also, when the doctor advised not to drive when you’re sleep-deprived, I actually snorted out loud. That meant I would never drive, which isn’t possible where I live.
I remember once when I was deep in the middle of my chronic depression, my therapist suggested trying to stay awake for 72-hours as there was some evidence that it can jump-start the brain out of depression. I decided to give it a whirl, and made sure to plan it around a time where I wouldn’t have to leave the house for those three days. Well, life happens. My BFF had her baby six-weeks early, right around the sixty-hours-awake mark. In addition to me doing this experiment, I had an incipient cold. I had to go see my BFF’s baby, of course, or at least visit them in the hospital. I managed to make it there, talked to my BFF, didn’t see the baby because she was in the ICU and I did NOT want to give her germs, then started driving home.
I was going down a road I’d traveled hundreds of times. I could make that drive in my sleep. but, with a lack of sleep (going on sixty-two hours), I suddenly had no idea where I was. I looked at the road ahead of me and did not recognize it. It was as if I’d never had seen it before. I somehow managed to make my way home (still don’t know how), held out for another hour or so, then crashed hard.
When I was in my second year of college, I started having weird fugue states in which I would phase out of reality then ‘wake up’ a few minutes later with no idea of what just happened. I wasn’t sleeping as made clear by the fact that if I were talking to someone, they still were talking to me as if we were having a normal conversation. I had to pretend I knew what they were talking about, which was disconcerting. Worse yet, though, was that I would ‘fall asleep’ while driving, only to ‘wake up’ a few minutes later having no idea where I was. Fortunately, the routes I was taking were familiar, so my best guess is that my brain went on auto-pilot. Still, I was very lucky I didn’t have a horrible crash.