Remnants 4 - Late-night Limbo: Part 1 (11 o'clock Fail)

I've always been pretty good at doing the limbo, not just because I'm short. I have good enough knee and back strength to bend into a bridge from standing. I think at some point in middle school we for some reason were doing a limbo competition thing and I won.

But late-night limbo is something else entirely. It's still focused on the concept of "how low can you go," but more in a mental sense, rather than physical. See, late-night limbo is all about having a competition with yourself to see just how low-level your mental processes become before you just lose and fall asleep from exhaustion. It's generally a single-player thing, but sometimes you can bring a friend along and see who loses first, or see how high you can get yourselves before falling back down to normal thought patterns.

Late-night limbo is not just an activity, but also a state of being and possibly an alternate dimension. Within the coming weeks I will seek to chronicle my trips into late-night limbo and its various forms.

I actually go into one type of late-night limbo almost every night. It usually happens sometime around 11 o'clock and lasts anywhere between 15 minutes and 2 hours. Essentially what happens is an uncontrollable wave of sleepiness bludgeons me over the head. As a result, I experience a very realistic sinking feeling that is either complimented by or caused in part by the melting of my posture such that my head slides down the back of my chair to be at keyboard level, with my arms, which sit on the armrests, being the only thing keeping me from sliding underneath my desk.

The psychological effects of entering this form of late-night limbo are relatively mild compared to other forms. The main feature of these effects is a total or near-total shut-down of the mind, meaning no conscious thinking occurs throughout this state. Of course, that is not to say that nothing happens after passing the entrance to this form of late-night limbo. In fact, a whole load of things can happen in this state, but awareness becomes so limited that almost none of them, if any, make it into memory. The only reason I know this is because occasionally, after I leave limbo, I'll scroll up in my IM conversations and find that I was periodically responding to my friends with things like nyeeeeeerg, blarg, and /tired.

While the actual competition portion of this form of late-night limbo is quite short-lived, it is often fierce and crippling. Sometimes I'll try to prepare myself for its fateful arrival by arming myself with music that you'd think would keep anyone awake. For example, here is a song by 夢中夢 (Mutyumu) that should give you an idea of what kinds of things I try to combat encroaching limbo.

...yeaaaaah. Like I said, even stuff like that is no match for limbo. After losing, I maintain a state of complete exhaustion until my body decides it's time to wake up. Trips through this kind of late-night limbo have hardly any transition in or out of normal conditions. What this means is that limbo hits, I stay in limbo for a while, then suddenly I'm not in limbo anymore. My brain gets restored to completely normal function, as if the whole trip to limbo never happened. It's really quite frustrating; a portion of time seems to have just been removed from my life. Since time itself is generally considered the fourth dimension, having part of it removed means that either it was lost to an even higher dimension, or that I have experienced the previously-unknown phenomenon of moving through the fourth dimension at a non-linear pace. In other words, I will have traveled through time if the latter is true. Of course, neither of these possibilities is likely to be valid, since late-night limbo is really just a giant mental failure.

Probably.

As a final note, I will share with you a song that has been proven over multiple trials to be unique in the sense that it is able to ward off limbo after it has taken control. That song is Hatsukoi Limited by Marble.

There are other forms of late-night limbo to be explored. Look forward to seeing them as I uncover more.

EDIT: I lied, that wasn't the final note. I'd like to give an honorable mention to fruit juice as strong defense against this form of late-night limbo. Sometimes if I feel limbo getting close, I'll go pour myself a cup of fruit juice, drink it, and then suddenly that sinking feeling disappears.