Mostly I go to sleep very easily. Like 3 minutes from lights out, max.
I’m content, I exercise, I burn my tokens each day, I think all that helps.
Often I wake early and think. I’m protective over what goes into my 4am thinking time, I enjoy it. You don’t get to choose what you think about at 4am. It’s inevitably going to be work. So I optimise for having interesting work and I’m very lucky there. Mostly I go back to sleep after a bit.
Sometimes I don’t get to sleep easily, for example in 2021.
In that case I close my eyes and visualise a device:
The device has 6 buttons arranged in two rows. It changes in appearance but the most common form in my imagination is a Dieter Rams-style enclosure in beige about 4 or 5 inches across with its buttons on the top, and the buttons are flush against each other with a circular depression on the top to push down with your finger.
The buttons are really satisfying to push. Good resistance, good slip-clunk into place when engaged.
Sometimes it’s different. Sometimes the button click in like a pen top when they’re down; sometimes they rise up as soon as I’m not pressing. Sometimes they light up when activated, sometimes not.
The game, in my imagination, is this:
There is some combination of buttons that I can push which causes me to instantaneously fall asleep. But I don’t know the code.
So what I imagine (it’s a visual and tactile experience) is trying every single combination of buttons until I push the right ones together.
There aren’t many combinations to try, only 63. I usually try a few then run through methodically by counting up in binary.
Perhaps the code is different each night, perhaps it is the same – I wouldn’t know because I discover it successfully every time and go to sleep and forget what happened.
I was gently advised against posting this because it makes me sound like a weirdo but you already know that about me. And now you know about the six buttons too.
Mostly I go to sleep very easily. Like 3 minutes from lights out, max.
I’m content, I exercise, I burn my tokens each day, I think all that helps.
Often I wake early and think. I’m protective over what goes into my 4am thinking time, I enjoy it. You don’t get to choose what you think about at 4am. It’s inevitably going to be work. So I optimise for having interesting work and I’m very lucky there. Mostly I go back to sleep after a bit.
Sometimes I don’t get to sleep easily, for example in 2021.
In that case I close my eyes and visualise a device:
The device has 6 buttons arranged in two rows. It changes in appearance but the most common form in my imagination is a Dieter Rams-style enclosure in beige about 4 or 5 inches across with its buttons on the top, and the buttons are flush against each other with a circular depression on the top to push down with your finger.
The buttons are really satisfying to push. Good resistance, good slip-clunk into place when engaged.
Sometimes it’s different. Sometimes the button click in like a pen top when they’re down; sometimes they rise up as soon as I’m not pressing. Sometimes they light up when activated, sometimes not.
The game, in my imagination, is this:
There is some combination of buttons that I can push which causes me to instantaneously fall asleep. But I don’t know the code.
So what I imagine (it’s a visual and tactile experience) is trying every single combination of buttons until I push the right ones together.
There aren’t many combinations to try, only 63. I usually try a few then run through methodically by counting up in binary.
Perhaps the code is different each night, perhaps it is the same – I wouldn’t know because I discover it successfully every time and go to sleep and forget what happened.
I was gently advised against posting this because it makes me sound like a weirdo but you already know that about me. And now you know about the six buttons too.