Sleep Deprivation and My Loose Grip on Reality

Over the past six months, I have come to appreciate as never before the Joy of Sleep, mainly because I haven’t had any. Actually, that’s not entirely true. If I’d not had ANY sleep, I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it. Apparently, you need a minimum of three hours sleep per day or your body starts to die. Some say four. Okay, don’t quote me on this information. Obviously, those statements require some sort of qualification but, frankly, I’m too tired to care.

Here are some other interesting ‘facts’ about sleep (all with their own varying degrees of accuracy):

• The average person swallows 2,33 spiders a week during their sleep (probably little ones...).
• If you laid all the sleep shorts worn on the earth at any one time in a straight line, you would have a lot of semi-naked people sleeping.
• Fish sleep with their eyes open.
• People who sleep with their eyes open are ten times more likely to freak their spouses out.

More seriously, though:

• The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident have all been attributed to human errors in which sleep-deprivation played a role.
• Seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%.
• British Ministry of Defence researchers have been able to reset soldiers' body clocks so they can go without sleep for up to 36 hours. The system was first used on US pilots during the bombing of Kosovo. (Unfortunately, they were supposed to be bombing elsewhere...)

And, strangely:

• Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain's sleep-wake clock. (Scientists have also not been able to establish who thinks up these obscure tests...)

Well, you needn’t be the victim of the twisted curiosity of a white-coated, bespectacled, laboratory-lurker to realise that sleep deprivation can lead to a warped sense of reality. Just have a 10 month old baby with a sinus infection. And as any new parent will confess (as long as anonymity is guaranteed), a warped sense of reality eventually leads to ... Unacceptable Behaviour.

Now, Unacceptable Behaviour really is a subjective term. So let me define it, for the sake of this discussion, as that which YOU would not do had you not been deprived of sleep. That should translate well into any context. Sure, you wouldn’t expect to see someone down a pint of their own urine if you were at, say, the V&A Waterfront. Maybe if you were in the Himalayas ... among a throng of orange-robed devotees ... but not at the V&A. However, if you were a Clifton Beach parent who had not slept longer than 30 minutes in a single stretch for the last two weeks, a tall, frothy, body-temperature draft of urea may seem perfectly sensible, if not appealing.

Now, my aforementioned example does imply that this Unacceptable Behaviour is what one may categorise as ‘socially unacceptable’, and this is certainly true although it is too narrow a category. Much more importantly, sufferers of sleep deprivation approach a class of behaviour which, under normal circumstances, would be unacceptable to their own internal code of conduct. Blow what everyone else thinks; I wouldn’t be caught dead in a pink shirt, Bru! And yet ... here comes, Frikkie, our young first time dad in a lovely cerise golf shirt, carefully laced with baby puke, with matching bags under his eyes. What a stunning combination!

Yes. It’s our own inner person which comes under pressure.

Consider another scenario: You walk into a crowded elevator on the third floor, and one second after the doors close and you start to descend, the guy next to you screams, ”Aargh!! We’re plummeting to our doom!! We’re all going to die! We’re all going to die!” while clawing at the side of the lift. At the ground floor, the elevator doors open and the occupants make a hasty exit leaving the pitiful, sobbing mass moaning in the corner. Sure, it’s unsettling for everyone else but more importantly, the bearer of the distorted view of reality has just gone through four storeys of terror. Clearly, this is not a healthy individual.

Let’s analyse this for a second. If the lift was falling uncontrollably, the initial sensation of descent would probably have felt not dissimilar to the initial sensation of controlled descent. It’s a matter of interpretation, then, that makes the difference between a total freak-out and the zen-like calm that occupants of a crowded lift normally assume when their personal space has been seriously invaded. So it would seem that, under normal circumstances, people have a kind of internal gyroscope which keeps them orientated on a reasoned view of reality when their senses would want to suggest otherwise. It’s a sort of self-correction when our view of reality gets distorted, and it helps us to continue to relate to reality when what we experience wants to drag us off to a padded cell somewhere and introduce us to an invisible man called Murray.

Now, sleep deprivation is not the only catalyst for the freak-out ... or shall we call it ‘Meeting Murray’. Many things can cause us to lose touch with reality; isolation, prolonged stress, noise, queues, traffic jams, Steven Seagal movies... And worst of all, losing touch with reality doesn’t always culminate in a single freak-out/break-down/’Oh my gosh! Did he just email all his contacts a scanned picture of his butt?!’ incident. No sir. For many, the breakdown is incremental, almost indiscernible, but reality-altering for the individual experiencing it. Sure, he notices the stress, he’s conscious of the traffic jam he is in every day, but less obvious is the departure he is making towards Unacceptable Behaviour.

Somehow, we all need the ability to hold on to a view of reality in the face of things we experience that tell us that things are not so. Somehow, we need to be able to fix ourselves onto reality when we lose the ability to relate to what we know is real. Some would call this Faith.

Faith is an entirely reasonable view of reality, though our experience in any given moment may not suggest consistency with that view. That is to say, at any given time, what you feel is not necessarily real. (Remember the screaming lift occupant?) Or vice versa: at any given time, reality doesn’t feel ... well, real.

The trick is to distinguish in the course of normal living between reality and your own translation of what your senses and emotions are telling you.

This presupposes that you start out with a pretty concrete grasp of reality. And let’s face it, that’s asking a lot. But maybe that’s easier to find then one might think. Faith in a God you can’t see or feel is no less reasonable than getting into a lift whose winch and cabling you haven’t inspected and can’t see. ‘Okay, but presumably someone else has inspected it.’ Granted, and presumably a God whom you haven’t seen and can’t feel has made Himself real to someone else, too. And their reality has become grounded so that yours and mine can be also. At least, until our experience becomes consistent with that reality.

Anyway, that’s how Murray explained it to me.