Insomnia

“…Goddamn it…”, I groaned as I dryly moved out of the deluge of clutter that I called a bed, yawning and scratching my neck like a drug addicted leper. 12 am it read on my apple monitor, the room was serenaded with the black creamy ambience of the dim moonlit night sky and ever-changing fluidic light show emanating from my screensaver like a beacon from another dimension. 12 am. Every time no matter how hard or sincerely I try to get a solid sleep pattern going for myself I can never get past the aforementioned hour without waking up always in the middle of a dream, and nine times out of ten, a dream that I couldn’t recall even to save my mother’s life. Not that it would matter anyway considering both of my parents have been gone from this life for quite some time now. The most I have to remember their presence is an old framed picture of us all together taken at Yosemite standing in front of a giant picture of a running buffalo and an inscription that reads: One Big Trio. They passed away fortunately before the “Dawn of the New Dark Age” that we are currently living in according to various public voices. 12 am…”Witches Hour”, at least that’s what the United Nations Department of Mental Health refers to it as, “ATTENTION ALL U.S CITIZENS: THIS IS A FRIENDLY REMINDER THAT WITCHES HOUR IS TONIGHT! 12AM TO 5AM ARE PEAK HOURS FOR PSYCHIC MANIPULATION. PLEASE REMEMBER TO TAKE 2 DROOM CAPS AT LEAST ONE HOUR BEFORE MIDNIGHT.” And of course added in are various clips and soundbites of current celebrities and social media personalities spliced together in a redundant loop of universal slogans and taglines such as, “CAP OUT BEFORE YOU TAP OUT” and “TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE AMERICA SANE AGAIN!” Huh..sane. Sometimes I wonder if anybody even remembers what sanity is, or was…what it felt like to be sane. So much time has passed since anyone could even feel secure enough to get a decent nights sleep without popping a succession of pills lest they be completely overcome with anxiety and dread from the unintended consequences of a good intentioned, though fatal ideology. Yes it must be about thirty years going now since the the Menlo Disaster happened. Disaster indeed. Prior to earning the gloomy title which is now the consensual referent it was originally called the “Menlo Project”; a well meaning group of young idealistic scientists from Stanford and various other high ranking and Ivy league schools who wanted to revolutionize the practice of mental health and Psychiatry, or to put it in the words of Dr. Bradley Stewart, their key spokesman, “We don’t just want to modify the practice of psychiatry, we want to shift the entire paradigm of mental health and society as a whole.” Oh yes, and shift the paradigm you most certainly did. It was called the Menlo project because allegedly the idea was thought up by Bradley and his crew from Stanford at a coffee shop in Menlo Park where they all hung out at for lunch. Later on as the project grew so did the participation from different Universities. They all played a very significant role in developing the experiment but the Stanford guys had it first, so I guess they got dibs on the name, anyhow. I’m no science expert and the most I’ve attained by way of higher learning is a four year philosophy degree from a community college/idiot school for morons, so I’m sure my account of the soon to be mentioned events will be surface at best, but my understanding of the experiment was that basically this collective of scientists wanted to develop a serum that would essentially “cure” people with moderate to severe mental illness or at least whatever “moderate to severe” was considered to be according to the spectrum at the time. The idea was that the problem of mental illness as a whole was essentially reducible to chemical imbalances in the brain which up until that point was only manageable through the use of medication. By developing a serum that could permanently alter the chemicals in the human brain and set them in a constant harmonious balanced state the diseased mind could then be permanently cured and be able to live a productive happy life in society. The coverage was sensational! For half a decade I can remember the news media and internet being saturated with this revolutionary drug that was going to save humanity! Think, if a drug like this could be successfully developed and patented then the possibilities were endless, even beyond severe mental health. Crime would be reduced to 0%, murderers, rapists, psychopaths all could be tried, convicted and sentenced and rather than being incarcerated could simply take a vaccine to permanently cure their mind of all criminality, the prison industrial complex would be reduced to a thing of the past. Racism would be cured, sexism would be cured, toxicity would be cured, incompetence would be cured, cyberbullying, drug addiction, sex addiction you name it, ALL problems of the mind would be cured! This was the idea. The idea that took on a life of its own and became the consensual ideology of the age. The paradigm had indeed begun to shift. It had started strong and at first the results were positive. All of the things that were predicted by Dr. Bradley and his merry band of mavericks had indeed come to pass; crime went down, depression went down, poverty, you name it. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. However there was one thing or rather multiple things, consequences, of which even the great minds of the Menlo Project couldn’t foresee. *BEEP BEEP* ATTENTION ALL US CITIZENS THIS IS A FRIENDLY REMINDER….* “agghh shit! I swear if I never have to hear that stupid f***ing message again for as long as I live it’ll be worth giving my mind up for extraction!” I yelled as the alert was bleeding out of my computer. Not to backtrack, but the reason why I keep waking up at midnight is because for the last month or, so I’ve been consistently not taking my two droom caps which technically by law everyone is supposed to take. Most take them out of fear and continue to alter their mental makeup in favor of living a life of sluggish mundane drudgery due to the various side effects of the drug but other unfortunately rebellious types like myself at a certain point have come to the decision that we would rather sacrifice our minds than our souls. How so you ask? Well allow me to explain the second part of the Menlo saga. When Bradley and his team developed the vaccine they pursued it with a burning passion like no other, a passion so strong that they had forgotten to ask the simple questions of "should we" and “what if?” What the Menlo team had not counted on was that this new paradigm may come with a deadly price. The price was that the drug was so good at what it was intended to do...in fact it was too good. Consequently what had happened was that people who took the drug began to be so in tune with their own brain development that they began to do things that others couldn’t. Some began read and write at incredible speeds, others began to develop breakthrough technologies both constructive and destructive in nature. New advances were being made in science and leisure, but they were also being made in war technology by way of biochemical weapons, drone technology, you name it. New developments in multidemsional reality were being rapidly attained and eventually multiverse travel had shifted from the realm of pure science fiction and theory to an existential fact. Pretty soon people were traveling and teleporting through multi dimensions at ease with mini nuclear warheads, double grip action sub-machine guns, lazers, poison gas grenades etc. and all kinds of murder and mayhem went on throughout the world, things that even till this day I am unable to describe. People had become “super-brains” and wanted to challenge each other like Titans while the common non vaccinated folk became mere collateral damage. Now, the question is if this new paradigm shift was supposed to bring about a Utopian society then why were we still engaging in war and destruction, inventing new ways to kill and conquer each other? Well I suppose the answer is that the Menlo Team were able to cure just about everything in the mind except for some of the oldest mental issues of mankind since time in memorial. Basic fear, anger, lust, pride, ambition, desire, greed, gluttony and the willingness to execute these primal drives by any and every means necessary. Yes, the unintended effect was that the chemical re-wiring had seemed to have exacerbated and inflated our base nature to an exponential level. This created chaos and destruction all over the globe like no one had ever seen before. Arguably the destruction comparable to three or more world wars had overtaken the human race in a matter of several years. By now we have been in nuclear fallout for the past 25 years and are just barely getting society to a relatively functional level, or so we like to think. The problem is however that some of those who took the vaccine all those years ago have now elevated themselves to the quantum level of dream space and have become something akin to vampires who now have an insatiable appetite to feed on the thoughts and dreams of those of us unfortunates still clinging on to the third dimension. By now we have certain optional medications that can protect our thoughts throughout the day during which their ability is for some reason hindered, but during the hours of 12 to 5 am is when their power is at its peak, "Witches Hour". Why do they call this "Witches Hour?" What I can only describe as God's quirky sense of humor or the Universes' cruel nature. Apparently some jackass scientist who probably watched too much Disney Channel as a kid had managed to figure out that a particular arrangement of musical tones and melodies when played at a certain level could create a frequency that would override the quantum field and block out some but not all of the "dream eaters" as some like to call them. It was just enough to where most would be blocked and those who remained couldn't affect your mind as long as you took the pills. And the song to save the night? "I Put a Spell on You" by the Hocus Pocus witches, an annoying relic from the end of the 20th century extracted from a Hollywood film for children. Surely this must be the ninth gate of hell described in ancient biblical texts. An eternity of being subjected nightly to the painful repetition of a crappy kids' song chanted by middle-aged witches from the 1990s all for the purpose of avoiding the loss of one's mind. How paradoxically ironical. But alas I have run out of words, and time, and the rest of this story will have to be saved for a later opportunity. I have to get some sleep...