On the subject of spontaneous bouts of narcolepsy

I like to think I’m pretty good with jetlag. Since I’m a freelancer with an international client base I work odd hours, which means I’m never exactly on resident-city time.

However since I got back from Australia I’ve started to experience a delayed onset of jetlag, and rather than manifest in the usual way – little bit sleepy in the afternoon, prone to waking up slightly earlier in the morning – my body has decided to get a little extreme with it.

This means that at any point during the day – and never the same point as the day before – it decides to completely shut down on me.  One second I’m making conversation about the quality of tomatoes (I’m a great conversationalist) and the next I’m slumped over the conveyor belt at the local supermarket, my head slowly making its way towards the cash register, nestled between said tomatoes and a head of lettuce.

And there is no way of waking me up from this slumber – any attempts lead to bleary-eyed stares and confused interjections of the dreams my body is trying to jam into my head, as I wobble precariously threatening to crack my head open on something (anything).

One of these sleep fits hit me this afternoon roughly thirty seconds after consuming lunch/dinner. The last thing I remember is putting a nacho chip in my mouth; the next, waking up at 10pm in a total panic because I totally overslept the three alarms I had set. (I have taken to setting alarms for all times of the day, just in case I happen to fall asleep and miss something crucial. Only now, apparently, my brain has decided to override those).

The only rather exciting thing about the whole phenomenon is the ridiculous ways in which my brain justifies the noises that happen around me. In the last dream I can remember, I was riding a tricycle through the city desperately trying to get away from something. But of course my tricycle wasn’t going very fast because it was one of those tricycles that a three year old from the 1950s might ride. Understandably I was a little panicked.

Suddenly my friend Yuri came bounding up behind me also on a tricycle (only a much, much bigger one - clever boy), opened his mouth and started to clang like church bells (is that what they do, by the way? Clang?). WTF brain?! WTF?!