"It's snowing, Macks," said Jake to his cat.
"Come sit by the fire. Snooze on your mat.
Just look out the window. It's too cold to play.
Let's ride my sled on a warmer day."
But Macks was
... [+]
Once in a blue moon, I become an insomniac. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: I become an insom-maniac. They say that the mind never rests, even when you are asleep. The way I imagine how that works is thousands – possibly millions – of tiny cogs, catching on each other, whirring away in the emptiness of the passing night. If I pried my mind open, would I see those cogs clicking into each other as the gears turned clockwise, anticlockwise? Of course, I'll never know for sure. Apparently, the mind never rests in order to process and discard sensory input. Maybe my mind sheds everything useless from the previous day like a moulting cicada – except where would the moulted shell go?
Strange thoughts like these pervade my consciousness in the surreal few seconds before sleep takes over. They race through my mind as elusive fragments; the preceding thought gets taken over by the next, until some main switch in my mind goes off, cutting off the power source to these strange, irrational thoughts.
Except: sometimes the main switch gets stuck, and I too am stuck with these thoughts. Until daylight hits, this constant stream of disjunct thoughts circulates within my consciousness. Like the crescendo of some twisted symphony, they grow in absurdity. If I had to choose a backing track to this madness, Schubert's Death and the Maiden seems fairly compatible. I spiral down a path of what seems like no return, dissecting every scene and every sound and every word in the past 24 hours – not because I want to, but because there's simply nothing else to do. The hazy morning mist from last night's rain, the shivery chill, the slight movement of breath-like air – I could dwell on every miniscule detail. Even worse are conversations: every sentence branches out to form a gargantuan probability tree. What were the possible paths the conversation could have taken, in place of the one that had actually happened? What were the probabilities of each, until they collapsed into a singular certain event? I painstakingly trek through these paths, turning them over and then back again in my head.
But the trek never seems to end: the darkness ahead seems to swallow everything, expanding indefinitely. I stumble in this uncertainty, feeling for my way out. No matter what path I take, trying to trace my way back to simple, rational thoughts – I remain lost in that dark maze, consumed by my own thoughts.
Until the day breaks.
