Caffeine Deprivation

Caffeine - "A bitter alkaloid found in coffee and tea that is responsible for their stimulating effects."
wordnetweb.princeton.edu

Deprivation (loss) - "The disadvantage that results from losing something."
wordnetweb.princeton.edu

Some symptoms of this condition include drowsiness, forgetfulness, clumsiness, frequent yawning and at its worst, unconsciousness. If the worst occurs the sufferer may also fall victim to one or more series of uncontrolled mental images and emotions. These images and emotions may even construct a dangerously realistic looking, feeling and smelling surrogate world that tricks the victim into believing all sorts of things which plainly are not true. Normally such people would be considered quite insane and locked up.

Perhaps Plutarch's observation¹ has prevented mankind from imprisoning everyone from the highest leaders to the lowliest cotters in the worlds largest sanatorium. Perhaps our own trips into madness every night is what's required to keep us sane. No one knows for sure if either statement is true. But some know that unlike the average Tom, Dick, Harry or Sally, on this rock floating through space they don't have a single dream world that they go to. To the contrary, they have yet to recall visiting the same dream world twice.

Take our subject, Subject X, for example. Since the fever induced Godzilla dreams of his youth Subject X hasn't had a dream in the same setting, nor involving the same people. His most recent dream had overtones of flat-earth, Mario Brothers and -- if you believe dream interpretations -- great trust for his subconsciousness or impending success or fortune.

In this dream our subject only recalls three major activities: climbing, jumping and swimming. You see the world he was in was a rather small cube shaped world with a peculiar gravity and a north to south rotation. He had the distinct feeling he would fall off the world -- should he stop moving. So he had to run, crawl, swim and basically scramble eternally, just to keep from falling. There were great bodies of water he had to swim across, massive flat, brick and sandstone landscapes to traverse, and eventually climb as the face of the cube he was on inevitably turned near to fully vertical just as he reached the edge.

However, the jumping he remembered best. In the murky and swampy areas of the world where neither a good running pace, nor swimming could occur, there lurked snapping turtles. Mind you these turtles weren't the run of the mill, finger amputating kind; they were the foot/leg amputating sort of turtle. As he trudged through this landscape, the turtles would lurk, waiting in the water near the small bits of solid ground. As he would approach they would thrust their necks up, out of the water, and try to make a quick snack of his feet. He would, of course, jump to avoid their maws, and occasionally use their heads as stepping stones. Apparently this was a most disconcerting task.

While this may seem a light-hearted dream, our subject reports it as a physically draining dream filled with a constant fear of falling off the world, or worse, being eaten to death by the lurking snappers. He claims the long swims across the bodies of water were the worst; he expected the turtles to appear and finally catch him. This is just one of a dizzying array of different and strange worlds Subject Xs subconscious has created for him.

He is, after all, a creative fellow; so it stands to reason his subconscious would be equally, if not more creative than his consciousness. However, with a creative and blatantly cruel subconscious mind such as Subject X has, Poe's statement about sleep being little slices of death, may actually be far more than cute metaphor for these people. Caffeine, and large doses of it, seems one of the few ways of preventing such nightly torment. . .


1 -"All men whilst they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own." -- Plutarch (www.famous-quotes.com)