I remember closing my eyes and opening them an hour later without any memory of having slept at all. It seemed as if I slipped into some temporal sludge and blinked, taking all of one hour to do so.

I immediately set off to go to sleep at once.

The curious thing about going to sleep is that the harder you try, the least likely you are to succeed. To add to that, failing at your attempts will only push you to try even harder (which of course will only make you fail more miserably).

I tried and failed miserably for one entire night.

It started with me reading a book. I usually read but a few pages before I end up losing my reading comprehension skills. This means that I have to keep reading the same paragraphs twice or thrice to make sure I actually understand them, only to find out when I wake up the next day that I can only remember reading through them and hardly recalling any meaning whatsoever from my repeated readings. Last night, I read well over one hundred pages in one pass and clearly remembered everything. I actually finished the book but realized that I was already tired of reading to even attempt starting on a new one.

Plan B was for me to count sheep. See, I haven't attempted this sort of thing since grade school and, by cruel chance, I found that I couldn't even think up sheep jumping over a fence anymore (I didn't know this sort of skill could be lost). Frustrated, I told myself that I never really liked sheep anyway. If I were to count farm animals, I'd count cows. Cows are infinitely cooler than sheep.

I decided then to just think of the single most boring thing in the world and keep a vision of it in my mind until I fall asleep from boredom. It should be as simple as possible, and I thought: nothing. Nothing as in nothingness - an emptiness, a void, an absence of everything, not something, not anything. I realized that it's not possible to think particularly about that, because I'd end up with (ironically enough) nothing, so I settled for the next best thing: limitless black space (which could have been equivalent to nothingness, had I not been mucked up by Jesuit philosophy). I then had problems envisioning the 'limitless' part, so I decided: a black square. It was good... for about three seconds, that is. Black squares, easily the most boring geometric representations thought up by people who think up boring geometric representations, are so boring that my feeble human mind wouldn't even dwell on it for longer than three seconds before moving into more exciting stuff, like concentric fuchsia circles and mauve hexagons.

It's not the first time that this sort of freak blunder has ever happened to me. I discovered that staying awake all night does not necessarily entail a sleepless state, because a fair number of brain cells do go into hibernation. It's almost like being aware of having half a consciousness and not being able to figure out which half. The funny thing about this altered state of consciousness is that, until you get some proper sleep, you'll probably be walking around like a half-aware zombie.

Having half-efficient perception, your body usually decides to compensate for this by making you more sensitive to all sorts of stimuli. It's the human brain's way of using brute force, I guess, since it lacks the means to be precise. I found out earlier that I could hear every bit of sound brought about by rush hour traffic, but I could hardly figure out the bus engine drones from the morning deejay. It was like fishing with fine mesh but not knowing how to tell fishes and octopi apart from the catch. It was a screaming spectrum, and I could only make out the decibels. Likewise, my visual perception was also messed up. For the most part, I could merely look at things, and not see them.

The brain also compensates for lack of sleep by giving you a compulsion to consume more food. The digestive system reacts differently, of course, in that it ensures you that the burst of flavors you experienced a while ago (thanks to an intense sense of taste) will be remembered for as long as you have gas, which is probably 80% of the time. The body just won't have enough digesting capabilities and the food you eat will most probably just sit in your stomach for a few hours, submerged in half-potent gastric juices... maybe even a few days. I recall breakfasting on eggs earlier this year after a one-night bout of insomnia and that I kept burping the same egg smell for the rest of the week. It gradually progressed to a balut-like smell by day five, and I'm probably remembering this inaccurately because I have never known how balut is supposed to smell. The moral of the story: eggs are bad, and bad eggs are particularly bad (which shouldn't be confused with devilled eggs, which are just plain evil). It's also not uncommon to feel an urge to throw up every so often after staying awake for more than twenty four hours (especially when burping noxious balut odors), and what I usually do to help relieve the urge is this: I think about boring geometrical representations.

Sleep deprivation, as I keep finding out, does not really result in a reduction in brain activity, but only in a reduction in the quality of brain activity. One of the first things to go, in my case, is usually the ability be grammatically correct. I sometimes cannot even complete sente

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