Following up on my previous post… The main way I’ve accomplished spreading myself so dangerously thin and totally losing all context is through lack of sleep. I’ve been lucky to get 5 hours a night the last couple of weeks, which for me is a little more than half of what I’d really like to have. And while I’m well aware of the scientific and apocryphal reports of the damage sleep deprivation does to one’s cognitive and motor abilities, I have to say there’s one area where it really makes you excel: gestalt. There’s nothing quite like staying awake so long and concentrating with such intensity that you begin to hallucinate. And one of the hallucinations you start to have is that everything is connected, and if you push that far enough you start to wonder if maybe everything isn’t actually the same thing. It’s hard to explain, and like all feelings of zeitgeist, gestalt (wait, both gestalt and zeitgeist?–do Germans not sleep?) and synchronicity (probably Jung slept, but only as research!) are at best a perception and very likely just a trick of the mind. But then what is “mind,” at the most basic level, but perception and trickery?

Yeah, see, right there, that’s what I’m talking about.