Crazy-Head: The Survey

I was having dinner with my old Time-Life latchkey-kid friend Eva last night at the venerable Pizza Box, and we somehow made the discovery that we both suffer from the same strange, intermittent sleep disorder. We'll be sleeping and dreaming about some kind of rote, stressful problem that can't be solved -- for me, it's usually a programming thing; for her, she said it was stuff like arranging the bottles behind the bar where she works -- and then we wake up and this awful cycle of thoughts won't stop. Like, I keep thinking about and trying to solve whatever problem it is that I was stuck on after I'm awake, but the entire... vocabulary of my mind is kind of devoted to thinking about this one thing. It's very disorienting and scary. Eventually you either go back to sleep or become more fully awake and it goes away. Eva calls it "crazy-head." I'd actually come up with a name for it myself, "rigid thinking," which I thought sounded pleasingly like a spell you might cast in first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but I like hers better -- it's descriptive and simple. Anyhow, she'd asked her boyfriend whether he ever got crazy-head, and apparently he was like, "No, never." She thought she was the only one until we talked about it. So I pose the question to you, the Internet: You guys ever get this? Leave a comment.

Reading a book of Nick Tosches essays that Nina lent me: I don't think I've ever really had fun in my life. Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually capable of it. Oh well, software to write.