Tuesday 12 December 2006

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the anime Tokimeki Memorial - Only Love. The renewing power of sleep is legendary; but where some people claim to wake up to blank pages and color pencils, I tend to wake up to a page filled with content already.

Brain content swapping

So I wake up after five hours of sleep (and nothing but sleep) and have no idea why I ever found the concept of backsides growing on trees to be funny or even interesting to anyone older than 4-5 years.

I am not surprised. It is pretty common that I weake up and feel very different from when I went to bed. Not like a different person, really. I am not like a couple of my online friends who have different persons in their brain, with separate names or totems or even genders. While that may enrich a person's life when there's no traumatic reason behind it, it could also complicate it to an extreme degree. It is not quite that intense with me. It is also highly unlikely that I will wake up one morning with the firm decision to murder someone. There is a common core in me, but there is also a lot of content that can be swapped in or out.

It doesn't even need to take a full night of sleep. Strictly speaking, it does not necessarily take sleep at all, but it seems to be more likely to change and greater changes if I sleep. Sometimes I nap on my commute bus home and wake up refreshed and with a completely different attitude. In fact, one of these days I slept almost all the way home and when I came home, the same temperature (according to the thermometer) felt a lot warmer to me than it had the last days before. My sense of smell was also far more acute than usual, which lasted out the day. And of course a headache can come and go during my sleep, but I am sure you all have experienced that.

And there is a lot of different content to choose from, just like if you browse randomly in my archives. Sometimes I feel like praying and singing hymns, sometimes I feel like writing bondage stories, sometimes I feel like playing some particular computer game, or shopping electronics, or listening to music, or cleaning the kitchen, or taking a long walk, or pondering international politics or the life cycle of stars... Pretty much anything except reading a book.

The lust for books tends to only show up after I've been awake for a long time. Reading a book is kinda like sleeping. Sometimes if I am very tired at work, I will read a little bit. Not quite as good as napping, but it is usually enough to tide me over if I don't have the opportunity to nap. Actually music is also fairly rare in the morning, now that I think about it, but it may be more likely to show up after a nap later in the day I think. Reading does not. Reading is for the tired mind. Or perhaps that's just me? Or just my family... I know my brother used to sleep less and read more than me when we were young.

Anyway, I know how this works, if I just stop to think about it. So if I am tempted to buy some useless electronics - say, a new mobile phone while I still have one whole and one broken - or download a pirated movie or some such dubious act, I may recognize that I only need to stave it off until next sleep. When I wake up, there is a pretty good chance that the temptation is gone. Of course, it is not absolutely sure. Sometimes I still love them in the morning. And as I said, I don't swap to a brand new person; I still have the same tendencies, but sometimes they are in the foreground and sometimes so far back that I almost forget them. Anyway, it is worth a try.

But not just to avoid looking like an idiot in my journal.