elizaskinner.net - the jambox

I quit drinking coffee a few weeks ago, and the effects just keep coming. My impetus to quit was entirely gastric - the coffee seemed to be burning a giant hole through my whole system, and I wanted to quit before I started pooping whole sandwiches. But as many of you know, coffee is not just a delicious attack on your stomach and colon, it is also a popular and efficient vehicle for NYC’s second favorite drug, caffeine. When I quit my daily intake went from 10 to .1 times the RDA in one day, and my body has had a weird time going through withdrawl.

Last night for example, I fell asleep at 11:00 and woke up in a cold sweat at 1:30. I had been having a dream about a disease attacking the country and slowing killing the population. Like a zombie movie, but with no zombies. I was living in a compound where everyone else kept hoping that the government would get control of things and everything would go back to normal, but it seemed clear to me that was not going to happen. Watching them hope and starve at the same time was tragic. On the bright side, I got to adopt a lot of dogs since their owners kept dying. But then I got one one with buttons for eyes and no feet, at which point the dream had definitely become a nightmare.

So Will called me and woke me up from that, which was a relief, and I went back to sleep. I never would have been able to go back to sleep like that when I was a coffee drinker! Of course, I never had terrifying dreams that were quite so realistic and hard to forget, so win one lose one.

Then I woke up at 3:30 to the sound of someone playing in water. Or was it rain? Or a rapist washing my dishes? No - no it was sheets of water streaming down my walls and out of my light fixtures. Then the water turned brown.

Then a tiny snake with the face of a man crawled out of my nose and started braying at me.
JK.
But it was pretty surreal.

I woke up my landlord and they turned off the water that was flooding in from 2 floors above me. This had nothing to do with the caffeine, but what did was the fact that I went back to sleep afterwards! Yes, I had to watch an hour of Empire Of The Sun (also pretty surreal) to get there, but I DID get there.

So here’s the moral of the story: If you don’t mind being tired a lot during the day and having horrific and vivid nightmares about social destruction, and you need to get more sleep, stop drinking coffee and send me $15. Works like magic.
Just trust me on the $15.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.