Rest Easy Now

In the Fleet, depending on your command, you may have what's referred to as a 19-4 schedule. For an entire deployment.

This is rather ghastly in my opinion. Not that I mind working all the time when I'm awake, but that business of four hours a "night" makes me shudder. (You sleep when they tell you it's time to sleep. Your rest time could be from 1100 to 1500.) I desperately assume that your body adjusts to the weirdness, and hopefully soon. Mine hasn't yet, and I'm still getting six hours a night most nights. Seven is really nice, eight is wonderful. Eight only happens on Saturdays when I'm off duty.

It's possible to live off of micronaps. Very high stress, your body will reject almost everything you try to put into it (including light and possibly air), and you're going to be temporarily insane, but you can live through it, and recover later. What's been proven scientifically impossible, apparently, is complete sleep deprivation. If you're not permitted even the micronaps, your body will be able to sustain for about a week and a half. Before Day 12, your heart will stop. Just can't keep up - sleep is the time for all the little workers to run around and do repair and maintenance while the system's down.

So, it could be a lot worse than the present symptoms. They're interesting, though. Hierarchy of needs in action some days - I can get up and work because I need to, but I can't eat. Just not enough sleep. That's rare, though - the appetite vanishing is more of a stress thing than anything else. Your muscles hang off you a little differently, too. Skin hurts. That's a new one. The dermis aches, and the epidermis stings. Actually, feels almost exactly the way it did when we all got tear-gassed.

But the dreams, man, the dreams! I have amazing dreams at night. And I love the way falling asleep feels, when you actually get there. I didn't realize before this that you could feel "when" you were asleep. Actually, when you're asleep, it feels like everything's okay. The stress lifts, there's a distance between you and what's going on and everything you have to take care of, and you forget how much things are screwed up in your body and remember your body the way it's SUPPOSED to be. Maybe that's why I couldn't read it before.

I actually fall asleep now by dreaming about sleeping at home. On the couch in the living room, with a book forgotten in my hands and flopped down on my chest. Or out cold in the family room in the wee hours of the morning - I sleep there when my room's not an option for one reason or another, and there's something kinda cool in the atmosphere out there when the house is asleep. My room is my lair, kind of, and it's so strange to dream about a bed and space that are "mine" as much as that space is. I don't think about that one very much, because it feels too good, and it's hard to come back to here.

Obscurely, my sister's room is where I best DEEP sleep. I don't know what it is, but if I go to sleep in there, I am OUT, and usually for a lot longer than I normally would.

Anyway, I'm on duty today.