The next night I went clubbing until 6 am. I slept some.
The next night I didn't sleep at all, I left for the airport at 2 am.
I was on a plane for the next 24 hours.
I arrived in Corvallis at night, unpacked from Madrid and packed for Country Fair, and I left at 3 am. When I arrived I had early morning tea with my mother and started the day.
I don't know how to count the sleep deprivation. I usually just say 4 days. But it was at least 4 days, plus 9 hours of jet-lag, plus lousy (2-3 hrs) sleep the two nights before.
That night at the Country Fair, I went to that Ritz. Communal showers and a sauna left me clean and comforted. The only problem I felt was slight nausea, out of no where. We walked back towards camp through dark paths. It was a 15 minute walk that I had taken easily 100 times in my life. I didn't need light.
But my mother's eyes were worse than mine. I told her that I found the lantern disturbing, its LED turning the forest into blacks and whites instead of golds and shadows. But she insisted that it was necessary. How could I argue, it was night.
The lantern bothered me more and more. I walked in front of it to avoid seeing the source. I walked behind it to be more in the darkness. I found myself holding back tears. It swung as my mother walked, its path following her shifting feet and swinging arms.
The nausea increased and I felt seasick. The whole world seemed to move with the lantern. I watched the forest rock in front of me. I walked far enough ahead to be out of reach of the light, trying not to betray my panic. The world calmed down again.
I became aware that I was in an altered state. The trees were making patterns that I had never seen before. Branches seemed to switch places, creating tricks of depth. The nigh-time gray scale faded from bright to dark, then bright things looked dark and dark things looked bright. The shadows stuttered.
At this point I took on a I'm-tripping sort of mindset, and decided to ride it out and see what it would bring.
I got back to camp and wandered aimlessly. Everyone else was going to bed, but I said that I was going to walk the paths. Somehow I had trouble leaving, though. I milled around, a growing feeling of aimless fear joining my nausea. I walked one direction and saw the branches, still moving and switching and pulling the same tricks as before, but now it all felt very threatening. I walked towards the stage and saw the towering panels that made up the stage set. The negative space they created with the trees and the sky made me feel so small and helpless. The trees kept tricking, making shadows in ways I could not anticipate. This familiar world, where I lived for 2-3 weeks every year, looked completely different and beyond that, it hated me.
I started crying. Graham walked back from the bathroom and I asked brokenly if he'd ever tripped from sleep deprivation. He held me and told me about one time when he had seen dinosaurs in wall paper. Even though I felt safer with Graham, the environment was getting worse. Things seemed bigger. Light still made me sick. Graham suggested I go to sleep. When he said it, it seemed like the right thing to do. I got into my sleeping bag, laid down, and closed my eyes.
As soon as my eyes were closed, and my limbs contained in the sleeping bag, I felt my head fall lower than my body. I felt that I was hanging upside-down, underwater, in a coffin. I sat up, put my hand over my mouth, and held back a scream.
I switched my direction, so that my feet were where my head was and my head was on the other side of the tent. I no longer felt like I was hanging upside-down. I fell asleep.
The next morning, I felt better. But throughout the day, I would see the same branches, the same shapes that I had seen the night before and all of the feelings of fear and rejection would come crashing back down on me. It was somewhere between a flashback and being triggered. In those moments, I was mostly afraid that this place that had been home for so long would now always be a place of fear.
I wrote everything down in the form of a letter to my friend Eric. I felt a little better.
When I woke up the next day the place had lost its danger, and was back to being home.
Moral of the story, go to sleep. Also, sleep dep is a good way to have a bad trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment