A sleep study is a medical assessment administered to patients presenting disturbances in their sleep and sleeping patterns. The patients who want sleep studies frequently include narcoleptics, epileptics, insomniacs, sleepwalkers and terrified dreamers.
Titled without any official eponym of pathology despite their sharing in restless agitations is the sleepless student. The sleepless student does not reserve the patience needed for any sleep study. The sleepless student does not even make time for sleep itself.
You can probably think of at least one insomniacal peer whose high achievements are as impressive as their sleep deprivation — which is oppressive enough to desperately warrant a sleep study. You see your prodigy in the lounge, the library or during lecture. They jot notes in pencil with fingers that tremble and redden their astigmatic eyes with blinding blue screens. Conscious of the cost of their ornamented resume and curriculum vitae, the sleepless student remains conscious from the witching hours of night and throughout the light of day.
Whipped into servitude were the subjects and their sovereigns during the era of monarchy, then pushed to produce were workers and their bosses during the era of industry. Now, the sharp lines distinguishing master and slave are erased. The subject we speak of today refers to individuals, served and produced by credit scores, health records and transcripts, that instead serve and produce them into their fixed identities.
Not long before university, the youthful student was grounded by their parents from flight, but since the student’s maturation, the limitless sky has left them high and dry. Even RAs do not tell the students “no.” Their teenage plans are fruitfully preserved from past cannings when there are fewer enclosures than there are openings. Though there are many windows of opportunity, the student reaches for the one with the penthouse view, simply because — with the perfect transcript — there is nothing that they “cannot” do.
Understanding that they can do anything, the sleepless student ignores the bowdlerized lines to draw their own laws of re-subjectification. The sovereign bossing the student is really the student whipping themselves awake.
The truly sleepless student deviates from haphazard insomniacs because they derive gratification from their waking self-flagellation.
Sleep deprivation excites neurotransmitters into releasing dopamine, and rushing through the student as a result are accelerants of euphoria, alertness and cognition. Those presenting with conditions noted for dopamine deficiency, including ADHD and depression, are opportune to shortening their sleep as sanitive. Their divergent paths of thinking can then be straightened into the sound thought paradigmatic of their academic setting. With sleep deprivation, strokes of genius can, for the public, be seized.
After every crack of the whip, the student’s seismic brain still quakes. When their brain finally ruptures, the sleep it contains bleeds out its lava of dreams.
The lecture hall transforms into a medieval court and pulses back every other frame. The professor flashes into a jester whose sane teachings intersperse with sudden spasms of gibberish. Immediately visible is the extension of an arm writing automatically in uninterrupted scribble, but the sleepless student does not recognize the appendage as their own. It is not understood how pigmented lines can trail behind the pushing of a pencil. It is not known if pencil pushing has purpose. Outside the window of opportunity floats a fanny packed jellyfish swinging a fascinating watch.
The student loses their particular self to become a field of scattered singularities and chaotic jabberwocky. The field’s points must be solved and integrally connected from scratch for the student to reclaim their point of view — their subjectivity.
The regrounding of themselves as the subject not only makes all objects easily determinable for the sleepless student’s study: their rebirth craters their studies into memory forever as their very first impressions of anything at all. In the exam room, study aids of self-death and self-resurrection impress the memory with unprecedentedly depthful information upon impact. Mnemonic devices become extinct species. Because of its cataclysmic recontextualization, the answer to the studied question may be more immediate to the student than their own name.
It is evening and the sleepless student falters. The student is the nightwatchman of their accomplishments, so before they let their guard down, they swing the watch in front of their fixated eyes. Studying again consumes the student and the student again consumes the notes. The student memorizes flashcards by turning their terms into the triggers of their trance.
Through sleep deprivation’s dissociative and singly concentrated conspirings, the student is more suggestible to the subliminals of their scholarship. Sleep deprivation then engineers the most potent conditions for learning.
So, when you see your sleep deprived prodigy next, be sure to more closely check their eyes. Their pupils will be dilated. Their irises will orbit spirals. The sleepless student’s pride is spun by a daylight sandman — a monster, by way of complicitness in its hypnotics, they survive — long after their testing schedule is free and when there no longer is any need. It must be one bad nightmare of defeat the student grieves in the wake of a good night’s sleep!
For their sake, try shaking them loose from their daze, and you might learn how you too can succeed. The sleepless student, not responding to their name, will start singing a chant on repeat — “There is no sleep — there is only study. There is no sleep — there is only study.”
The sleepless student needs a sleep study but they say they want an A. Staying awake, even without a reason, is how they can escape.
