A while ago I read a technique for achieving something--hallucinating, meditating, lucid dreams, some crap like that. It was to slowly count backward from 100 while imagining oneself falling through the air. I think the book cautioned against using this just to fall asleep, but for me that was about all it did. Lately I've had increasingly frequent nights of lying awake for hours with every conceivable thought racing through my head, which surpisingly enough can really drive you insane after a while. I tried concentrating on my breathing, but the fact is breathing just isn't enough to concentrate on, at least not for me. There are pauses between breaths, and in those moments other thoughts deviously sneak in. I also had a tendency to breathe very deeply, causing my heart to start pounding, which is not at all conducive to sleep. The counting technique must have gotten into that stream of thoughts because I decided to give it another try. I decided this time on a policy of one number per breath, as it otherwise becomes distracting trying to maintain a consistent pace. After one night I also dispensed with the "falling" stuff, because it's just silly and unnecessary. I always ended up just counting, and then every few numbers, saying to myself "oh right, and I'm falling too! fall fall fall...count count cou-fall! count..." and so on.

Some interesting things happen while doing this. Thoughts still sneak in, but in this relatively controlled environment, in which they are purely unintentional and not part of any real or useful train, it's possible to almost watch them pop up and then wonder about why they occurred. Since all I'm supposed to be thinking about is breathing and counting, must all these thoughts have some connection to one of those that causes them to come about? Some of them are as strange and sudden as dreams, and seem like they couldn't be anything but random synapse firings that come together in some bizarre way and then fade out. An example would be great here but so far I've never remembered any of them long enough to document them without disturbing the process.

Another phenomenon I've observed is that I seem to lose feeling in parts of my body, but not in the manner of true numbness, with the tingling and all. For example, I realize that I can no longer tell whether my mouth is closed, or my feet are touching. This always happens at a moment in the process when I achieve a profound stillness, in contrast to my usual tossing and turning, that only seems possible when distracting myself from physical sensations through some technique like this. Sometimes I'll give in and move a bit to instantly get the feeling back, and when I do this, I suddenly feel as though before I had been trying to feel it in the wrong place (if that makes any sense).

What one usually realizes after doing anything like this for a while is that it isn't so much this technique that works so well, it's just something new, anything different, and it wears out after a while. Tossing and turning is the same effect on a smaller time scale. The first few nights I fell asleep either before finishing the count or just about at its end (I could never remember whether I had stopped at 1 or 0). After that I had one night when I failed to fall asleep after completing the count. That prompted me to try another procedure, in which I count back and forth from 10 to 100 in increments of 10, just going on and on until I conk out. (Don't ask me why the 10's and 100 rather than 1's and 10, I think it's just a good feeling to reach 100 for some reason, probably all those years of schooling). The infinity is nice, since I don't have to worry about what I'm going to do when I finish, but it also seems to bring me closer to a point where I'm giving myself a virtual lobotomy just to avoid the insanity of overwhelming thought.