When I can't sleep, typically because I'm being colonized by a microorganism, I often have Puzzle Dreams. They are not good things to have. I think I've described them here at some point: they occur in a kind of no-place, and involve a series of interlocking wooden pieces of differing grains and textures that must be fit together in a specific way. I don't actually know how to solve any of them, my mind is just outputting this crap in some twilight state. I never see the solution, I just know that it was solved somehow - and then it's on to the next infinitely complex space.I have a similar thing where I perpetually solve these infernal sort-of puzzles, which are often inflected by whatever game I've been recently playing most often. Also sometimes I see swirls of color and heat. Also sometimes I feel as if my body is swelling very quickly, and rapidly rising. What happens to your brain and body under these circumstances?
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
The weirdness before sleep
Tycho of Penny Arcade writes:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I do puzzles too; it's usually pretty directly related to specific puzzle games (like Tetris or now Critter Crunch), but it can also be entirely new. When it's a specific game, my ability to solve it seems to relate to my mood and my degree of sleepiness; if I'm in a bad mood or far from sleep, the puzzles can't be solved or end in the worst possible ways; if I'm in a better mood or close to sleep I get long strings of small, technically impressive combos. The rules are never actually in place; I just know I'm doing really well or really poorly and I get little jolts of happy or sad feeling.
ReplyDeleteMost of the time it's puzzles, but when it's not it's usually different perceptions of sound--I'll hear something that sounds like gunshot that's actually my pillow, or I'll hear music that's actually my pillow. The weirdest thing for me is when I make involuntary sleep noises but understand I'm making them from beginning to end. Like, I have no control over them, but I'm aware of them totally.
The only full-body thing I can think of is that sometimes falling asleep feels like actually falling and it wakes me back up.
I get this same awful effect from games in which you can edit environments. I spent a sickly Saturday a few weekends ago in a level editor and through the night in my dreams I constructed an endlessly tall tower and woke and tried to build the thing and felt sicker than ever.
ReplyDeleteFor me in these dreams or half-dreams there's always a sense of wakefulness like I'm not really under and also a sense of urgency.