Sunday, October 07, 2007
On sleeping on it
What probing deep
Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
One of the final requirements in Learning Psychology class is a learning project, which basically means you have to teach yourself a skill and give a demonstration of it right before the semester ends. For creativity, and because drinking is the only vice I took to, I decided to include "How to Open a Bottle Without a Bottle Opener" in my proposal. Needless to say, it was the approved right away.
So I set two weekends aside for trying to teach myself the skill. Since I don't have time to sit down and ask for lessons from the dorm landlord, I try learning from a few YouTube videos and a bunch of posts about leverage and physics whatnot beneath them. Two weeks pass, and I still smell like Coke every time I practice on the sink, since every attempt ends up a sticky, sugary mess. Not what I put in the project proposal.
The weekend before my demonstration, the Comm Arts-Humanities Department assembly, the COMA 105 photography workshop and the alcohol taken the previous night mean that I fall asleep in my room the moment I get home. Eighteen dreamless hours of hibernation (with only about ten minutes for lunch) later, I wake up with a compelling desire to attempt my project again. I get up from bed and go straight to the bunch of bottles I bought to practice upon, and succeed on my first attempt, my spirit ascending along with the bottle cap as it jumped and almost hit the ceiling in our joint ecstasy.
...
One "Magic: the Gathering" novel tells the story of Jhoira the artificer, who went on what te Ghitu, her tribe, called a "spirit walk," a coma that struck after she became depressed with a dilemma that, if not acted upon, would kill a friend of hers that was stuck in a time rift. Upon waking from the coma, she immediately started drawing plans for the machine that, upon completion, solved the problem and saved her friend.
...
After my successful presentation just before this weekend, I told Ma'am Eloisa the story of what had happened to me, and asked her if there was a term for the experience. Apparently, as far as the psychology academe is concerned, there is no acknowledged term for learning how to do something, with neither past experience nor prior knowledge of doing it, by sleeping on it for a long period of time. Or if there is a term, it is probably one that is used rarely, as even Ma'am Eloisa's fellow psychology teachers did not have an answer.
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