Hypnagogia
Consciousness drifting off...
The myriad happenings and actions of the day twirl and twig on, mnemonic afterimages burn out their momentum, a campfire finishing itself into coals. I have invested much into soundproofing my 1001 square foot, one-bed one-bath high-rise apartment in the city’s center, aorta, core, la coeur urbaine. I want only to rest my head where the heart first beats, where the very first part of what a heart beat is, happens. If there is something going on in this city (and there always is) I want to be within earshot, not necessarily to hear it but to be close and really to know that I am close to what’s happening - the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, where what people are talking about hath gone down or transpired; to this, I desire approximation.
And this has been achieved. And I have done well, they tell me, they pat me on the back (or they would’ve if it were ten or fifteen years ago); they like or love or laugh at my posts without fail. Without fail! I am well known and highly considered and live near the action, always.
Still, I tire. Much to my chagrin. I am human, a mammal after all, with biological needs like sleep and a circadian rhythm that orients, despite my agency, my mastery, my power and dominion, how I am to spend each twenty-four hour day. As our species is inclined, so I tend to live, dividing wakefulness and sleep between day and night. I possess tools and tech to work around this, when I desire or when my work flow inclines me: dealing with clients or talking to associates in Karachi, Almaty, or Dubai (there are many others, and to you an exhaustive list would be boring and probably also somewhat intimidating; here I am trying to be relatable), I have sable dark black-out curtains that bar the sun’s rays completely, silken eye-masks and red and blue and UV light emitting devices that can signal peak wakefulness or begin my biology’s somnolence at any time. Work as I want to, cashing checks (virtually) and snapping necks (figuratively) as the world turns, eventually, there is no beating it, there is no winning the fight: sleep I must, if only for a little while, if only for ninety minute intervals, the time necessary to complete a REM cycle. It is then, when I can no longer fight what my brain craves, that I lay down to rest, and in drifting off experience hypnagogia, the drift of consciousness, when all my ambitions, thoughts, plans, and self-recited records of achievements slip out from the fore to the aft of my awareness, as if placed in a closet or behind an immovably dense curtain of torpor. I remain conscious for as long as I can, I witness the complexity and the intentional, idiosyncratic propulsion of my thoughts diminish, and their randomness and arbitrariness increase, and for some immeasurable unit of time it feels as though I am no longer the one in control of my thinking. It’s no longer ‘my’ thinking anymore, or at least it doesn’t feel like it, and I am drifting off, slowly, slowly - this must be what it’s like for the device itself when I finally hit the power button on my computer, when I even do that, anymore.