Attack of the zombies
I have several years’ experience of taking slow-release vitamin B supplements and I have come to observe numerous times that if I take it late at night, I don’t sleep, and indeed have a very similar experience to when I have caffeine, and similar to those times I don’t sleep after beer. This was in the back of my mind yesterday when I took such a slow-release multi-vitamin with vitamin B late yesterday. Worse, perhaps, I swilled it down with Spirulina, which I have not been taking recently but which I found to have a real beneficial effect when I first tried it around the same time as I started taking vitamin B those years ago.
I had been sleeping well in my new bed. With no students around I was at home all the time, of course, and the double bed they had left was an improvement on the fold-out sofa bed we had been sleeping on at my folks. In fact, in however many weeks we have been there - two, I think - this was my first poor night’s sleep.
I was spiked, like I am after coffee, that is, alert, and yet very tired. My thoughts weren’t racing, and I drifted in and out of sleep, but it was shallow sleep.
Often in this condition I remember my dreams better than usual. This time I did so as much from getting up to go to the toilet as anything else, but my sleeping pattern was definitely disrupted, and I have been feeling the effects since around three o’clock when I’ve been feeling zombified.
I suspect it is a kind of lucid dreaming. I have felt that many times, that I am aware of myself dreaming. This time I was in a recording studio listening to the producer, who I could not see through the widow, talking to the black hip hop-style performer as I was setting up equipment or some such. They were talking about children, family, a fairly deep, mature conversation, and then a little more polite perhaps, the singer talking about how he didn’t know so many producers in America since there are so few of them, more in Britain. I don’t now remember it well.
It was years ago I first started taking vitamin B and though it made my piss resemble a cantonese duck marinade, and abslutely stink (I am pretty paranoid about the smell, which is what I imagine urine might smell like were you to reduce it in a pan for a while, wiping my old man countless times while at home, and shaking and squeezing the fella at urinals), it seemed to make me concentrate better. At least, I felt so at the time - it gave me extra confidence.
Back then I was working in a hardware store, and doing a pretty cackhanded job of it, invariably forgetting several items of a short list of jobs to do given by the infinitely genial and forgiving boss everyday. Often, in giving me verbal instructions, he would report that I had assumed my glassy-eyed look. This was a look that came over me involuntarily when I wasn’t interested, and however much I wanted this time to just see out those few instructions, it wouldn’t happen. Fortunately, there was another guy there who was similarly afflicted, who would himself muddle up the simplest things, and we became a right double act. He wasn’t ADD, though he was dyslexic and says this affected his memory, but he was the kind of character who can really make a place worthwhile, and when I had come back to the Black Country after uni, when I had gone to uni to escape this place, he was somebody who helped me cope with the place. He was the first person, really, I opened up to about my writing when before, it had been a guilty secret tangled up with my illness.
For a while I had been worried about the exclusion diet and whether I would be able to continue taking multivitamins, before from the leaflet I was given it wasn’t all too clear. I don’t want to be quite so laissez faire with fruit as it says, since I do think fruit can be a trigger itself - the amount of bananas I have eaten over the years has always been excessive, for a start, and then there’s the smoothies and dried fruits and the rest of it. It may be that I would not get enough vitamins and minerals on the diet to compensate for a deficiency in my processing of vitamins - one that the sores in the corners of my mouth, for instance, would seem to indicate. If this were the case, then presumeably, I wouldn’t necessarily see any benefit in symptoms from the exclusion and the diet would not be as useful as it should be. But from fretting about the vitamins, I begain to wonder whether the supplementation regimen I have settled upon bares any relation to what I need. How would I know? I mean, presumeably, it is possible that I might feel some extra security from these pills, and gain some confidence as I did those years ago, without actually seeing any real benefit. I decided for that reason to cease some of the supplements yesterday. I didn’t take anything in the morning, and certainly didn’t feel bad for it, indeed I found I could concentrate better than I often can (though it is always difficult to judge, and it is true that I was listening to audiobooks rather than trying to read for most of the morning, and this may make a difference). But I didn’t hold my nerve. Later, I started to drift a little. I wasn’t concentrating and it was my last day off, and my last day without interruption and without M____, so that’s when I took a multivitamin and washed it down with spirulina.
I some kind of a build up in my head. Now, I was working on a pretty tough passage, trying to introduce Darren, and I was getting into real philosophy, with Godwin’s Treatise on Political Justice in front of me, but this was something other than mental strain. It was a kind of build up I had to wait to pass.
So the question is still unsettled. I will have to exclude vitamin supplements sometime, but there is as much a problem in weaning myself off them than there is even with alcohol and cheese because of the security blanket phenomenon. It’s clear that vitamins can have their negative effects, stopping me from sleeping and the positive effects are more or less presumed for much of the time.
That’s something I will have to tackle some more before further taking on this diet. Once I have had a good night’s sleep, of course.
Oh, and the first real slip since the transition phase of this new diet ( though the only real thing now I haven’t excluded to be on the diet for real is lemon juice): I had a cup of black decaf coffee around three o’clock, because that can’t hurt, can it!
