Convalesco

Before joining the army I was addicted to sleep. I was sleeping 11 hours per day. It was really hard for me to wake up when I was sleeping. After joining the army, sleep became something rare for a list of reasons. Most of them are related with the army. You rarely sleep more than three hours straight. Every three hours you have to wake up and do something. This means, that I rarely achieved REM status.

Although I am very happy with being to sleep just three hours per night for a few days and be fully functional, without the apparent need for sleep as before joining the army, I had a few bad experiences. The first one was four months, when after of four days of not sleeping, for various reasons, I had a sequence of illusions. I had to stay awake until 14:00. Before 11:00 the same day, I was not able to hold my eyebrows up for more than fifteen seconds. I was closing my eyes and watching dreams instantly. Not just random scenes, I’m talking about entire dreams. What I understood is that my dreams were related with the people that were joining the room I was sitting too. Yes, I was falling asleep while sitting on a wheelchair. The words and the laughs of the people that were joining the room were a part or the introduction of a dream. A dream, often, doesn’t have a logical script. I see people flying, or see weird scenes, apparently not correlated. While I understand the meaning of these random scenes put together in that specific order, it’s hard to explain them in a reasonable way to others, or even describe them here. Although this seems oxymoron, because we dream in REM status. In order to achieve REM status, you need to sleep for a few hours. Seven is the optimal number of hours, for my age. I’m 26 now.

Today, I came home at 16:28 . I took a hot bath and fell asleep. I just opened up my eyes, I can’t remember nothing, the ring phone woke up me. My sister called at 21:54 . I was still deeply sleeping. I woke up and ate a hot soup with my mother. I’m still feeling the desperate need for sleep. Probably I accumulated many (almost) sleepless nights. It’s the second time since I joined the army that I feel so tired. I’m feeling physically tired. Snowboarding and guarding came all together these last five days without much sleep, three to four hours per night max. However, I didn’t felt tired in the morning.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to get some sleep after my term finishes on May 07 2008.