BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

In 2000, I left my home to go to Massage School in Florida. Just before I left, I had asked my therapist of five years what, exactly, was wrong with me. Though diagnosed schizophrenic at eighteen, he answered, 'We don't know, but we're pretty sure something. Keep taking the meds.' I was disgusted. I'd taken Risperdal at various dosages for five years. For the uninitiated, Risperdal is an antipsychotic that can suppress sexual response: I can become erect, but no orgasm. Not even shooting blanks, just sex that goes on too long with no orgasm, period. Over the next couple of months, I took myself to lower and lower doses.

Four months later, I had dropped twenty pounds and felt more alive than ever. For five years, I'd slept continuously, sometimes twelve hours a day on school days. On vacation, I would sleep for sometimes seventeen hours at a time. Now I stayed up all night twice a week, and I didn't catch up on the sleep. I'd drink coffee and go to class with no sleep. I'd take people to Paine's Prairie to watch the sun rise. I'd take people back to my place to meditate and when they left, I'd surf the Web until dawn.

The event that put a stop to all this was profound; I stayed up for almost seventy-two hours straight. Near the end, I was sitting in class on a cushion in a ring of cushions: normal massage lecture arrangement. The professors were all old or mature hippies, so we all sat barefoot on the floor in class. My eyes kept dropping closed, but after months of little sleep, I felt like pushing through to 72 hours so I could say I'd done it. I opened my eyes one more time and saw the teaching aide sitting near me, a curious expression on her face as she looked in my face. Another second passed, and her entire form squiggled and dissolved. Only her cushion remained. I realized I had seen an hallucination, a full-form spectral apparition, if you will. After that I excused myself to another classroom and passed out on the couch. My sleep patterns have never recovered, in fact I haven't slept regularly since I started taking LSD in high school.

Exp Year: 2000	ExpID: 19188
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 27, 2002	Views: 23,375
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Sleep Deprivation (140) : Health Problems (27), Multi-Day Experience (13), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)