the psychosis of night shifts

Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
luka said:
the last time i saw corpsey he was in this really weird mood saying h was going to cqrve your penis with a knife in a way that made it look like a' tulip'. he reckoned he'd found this pattern to slice it in that would make it flower. and he wouldnt stop going on about it. hes really weird.
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you’ve met Levi Bellfield and lived!
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I always liked the rave thing where you're coming home on the train or exiting the club, and you see the morning shift start: seeing the "shop shutters yawn open." Mind you, I've only experienced it once or twice, but I like the idea, I like the frequent telling from those who do rave. It's clearly an important part of the ritual, coming home when the straight world's only starting.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Being "sync'd up" temporally is one of those things that can make or break a friendship, romantic relationship. Sometimes you hear about couples, one of them's day shift one of them's night, and they share time in the interstice. Sad and beautiful and romantic. And it's one of those things that highlights how much we live in cyclical time, and not linear time. Shifts and seasons.
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
suspended said:
I always liked the rave thing where you're coming home on the train or exiting the club, and you see the morning shift start: seeing the "shop shutters yawn open." Mind you, I've only experienced it once or twice, but I like the idea, I like the frequent telling from those who do rave. It's clearly an important part of the ritual, coming home when the straight world's only starting.
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When I got home from night shifts at 6 or 7 where in winter it's still completely dark in Denmark, I'd smoke a cig out the window looking at the building across from me and see the lights beginning to turn on in the different apartments, people getting up, the yawns, the catatonic stillness, mothers and fathers appearing in kitchens with the child on their shoulder.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
I've done maybe 15-20 overnights, get home at between 5:00-7:00 am, love the early sunrise and normie society starting to stir. found it hard to get more than a few hours sleep, though. crash out from 7:00 am until around 9:30-10 am, then the body clock says sorry but it's daytime, you are now awake.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
working nights in night clubs is ghostly but that's not as disorienting as working days in empty nightclubs, some places are night places
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Great thread which I can't really contribute to, having never done a night shift. Closest I've got (other than drug binges) is working til dawn various times to finish essays for university. Finishing them at 7am or whatever, not able to proofread it, barely able to think at all, staggering like a zombie to hand it in. Horrible.

The feeling of being awake all night and watching the sun come up etc. is great but the feelings that immediately follow this feeling tend to be horrible (unless the drugs are still working and ideally the party is still going).

Shame about 9-5 really it would be great to have more latitude as to what consitutes "normal" waking hours.
 
W

william_kent

Well-known member
teenage "Bill": I remember tripping all night and then having to show up at college in the morning, trails and traces still evident, and walking up to the main entrance and seeing a bunch of people through the plate glass who were sat on chairs in the foyer, and then pulling the door open...but nothing! ... it didn't move in the slightest, and they were all watching me struggle.. and as much as I pulled the door it would not budge, and I was almost consumed by terror, until I realised it was locked and then I just waited until the janitor turned up and opened it... but that feeling of confusion of 'I am opening the door, but it is not opening, I'm doing something wrong and they are all laughing at me' almost freaked me out.. I learnt it's best to avoid unexpected situations when high on LSD ( not for the first time to be honest )

I sometimes like to peruse the "train wrecks and trip disasters" section of the erowid trip reports and will shake my head at the accounts of some teenager who drops several tabs or plucks some angel's trumpet and then heads off to school... but I can't be judgemental because..maybe I was that kid...*

* except I wasn't: it was my brother, who after dropping a tab, and he was supposedly a Millwall hoolie, now married to a bezzie mate of the late One Eyed Baz of Zulu infamy , who freaked out and bust in to my mum and dad's bedroom and screamed "I can't breathe" and they rushed him to hospital and then the locum asked him "are you tripping?" before sending them all home... lightweight**...

** I'm joking here because, although I'm soft as butter, my brother's hooligan reputation did gve me a free pass in certain situations
 
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Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
Ghostly quiet on a rare ward obs run, uncanny, no alarms or even snoring

Long echoey-white funnels for corridors, disorientating as if the world is off kilter. Add depth of night, drooping awareness after poor sleep

The numbers are down for once, no agency in and the lull before 7am handover is always a surreal hour but tonight I could feel the history of an old site zoning up from my subconscious, a sense of unease and I know the gaff intimately. It has a suicide body count and very occasionally it creeps up on you oppressively
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
entertainment said:
When I got home from night shifts at 6 or 7 where in winter it's still completely dark in Denmark, I'd smoke a cig out the window looking at the building across from me and see the lights beginning to turn on in the different apartments, people getting up, the yawns, the catatonic stillness, mothers and fathers appearing in kitchens with the child on their shoulder.
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Any tits though?
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Corpsey said:
The feeling of being awake all night and watching the sun come up etc. is great but the feelings that immediately follow this feeling tend to be horrible (unless the drugs are still working and ideally the party is still going).
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I don't think it has to be that way at all. Yeah I get that if you get completely wankered and ride it for days then you are setting yourself up for a crash... but for one night, I'm pretty sure that any reasonably healthy person ought to be able to skip the sleep - with or without stimulants - and have no real bad effects other than feeling a bit tired.

In the same way as an average person who misses, say, lunch one day is gonna have no ill effects other than feeling a bit hungry. Physiologically neither are particularly significant.

I find it quite surprising that anyone would, as a rule, feel horrible after missing a single night's sleep - unless it's in conjunction with something else. Sure, maybe if you end up alone, on a comedown, perhaps realising you spent way more than you intended and can't pay your rent this month, or if you have to immediately face a gruelling day at work or whatever... but in each of those scenarios I just created which could be described as [Stay up and night] + x, I reckon that the x part is contributing more to feeling bad after a bender than the missed sleep. I'd suggest maybe that you're mistakenly blaming the wrong part cos it's the common factor (and admittedly one that comes hand in hand with various more harmful behaviors). Or maybe it's become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where you expect to feel bad and then you do.

Don't mean to sound patronizing here, but I bet if you planned a bit in advance and arranged things so that wherever you went back to afterwards was comfy and well supplied and maybe you had a mate who'd been out with you to crash on the sofa or in another room - and be on the same kinda level when you wake up so you can go for a fry up or whatever together. Then I think you would have n allnighter with no big fucking sinking feeling crash type thing - and then do that a few times and you realise that that was all in your head and you really did need to suffer like that.
 
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