A Sleep Story: An Unintentional Exporation of the Altered States of Being Awake

By Martin W. Ball

From the author of Being Infinite comes a new memoir and deeply personal story of suffering and learning to cope with a chronic sleep disorder for which there has been no medical miracle, no spontaneous healing, or spiritual transformation.
This is a story about what happens when sleep goes bad, and when there’s no clear reasons why or no clear path to fixing what’s gone wrong.
In January of 2019, after experiencing a lifetime of poor sleep and a rapid and dramatic degeneration of his ability to sleep over the course of 2018, author and nondual entheogenic educator, Martin Ball, completely lost the ability to sleep or ten consecutive days. This horrific event, what lead up to it, and the challenging and difficult aftermath is explored in intimate personal detail in this book. No stone is left unturned in this unintentional exploration of the altered states of being awake.
In his account of his chronic sleep disorder, Ball shares details from his personal life, relationships, and attempt to regain some normalcy with his sleep by rediscovering himself, his purpose, and how he rebuilt his life. As he states at the outset, it’s not a story with a happy ending, because while there’s been improvement, there’s been no end to his chronic condition which now impacts his life on a daily basis.
Not that he hasn’t tried. Within these pages, you’ll get all the details about neurofeedback, transcranial magnetic stimulation, acupuncture and Chinese herbs, blue-light blocking glasses, sleep coaches, therapy, meditation, visualizing better health, supplements and medications, binaural beats, diets, and so much more.
Along with personal experiences, Ball also includes his many observations on life, culture, politics, coronavirus, manufactured outrage, conspiracy theories, conspirituality, psychedelic culture, and the various approaches to health and wellness from a critical and rational perspective. Sharp, sardonic, ironic, and at times, grim, Ball shares it all in this personal narrative about suffering and uncertainty, and learning how to accept and live with it when life fails to provide relief or answers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781304716408

Book preview

Acknowledgements:

I would like to extend thanks and gratitude for all those who have helped and supported me during this extremely difficult time of my life as communicated in these pages. There were a number of individuals who gave freely of their time, expertise, and services to assist and care for me, and you have my utmost gratitude. This is not meant to detract from those many healthcare professionals who provided their services for a fee, as you were a great help as well, and I’m very glad that you were there for me. A special thanks goes out to the global 5-MeO-DMT community, a group with which I’m particularly identified, for all your love, support, and help. You guys really made a difference for me, and without you, this might have been a very different story.  There were many, especially early on, when my medical bills were quite significant, who supported me by way of donations and financial support, from both the public and from family, and I thank you.  Receiving decent healthcare in the US is an extraordinarily expensive endeavor, and very few of us can do it alone, with healthcare costs being the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. It’s a reflection of the sorry state of affairs in this country, the richest in the world, which provides some of the worst, and most expensive healthcare. I, like many people, needed the support of others to navigate through it. So, thank you all for contributing in whatever way you could, whether through text, voice, or email messages, phone calls, visits, or offers of refuge and support. Thank you for making it possible for me to receive your love.

Dedication:

I would like to dedicate this book to everyone out there who suffers from a chronic medical condition for which there has been no relief or healing outcome. For what it’s worth, I’m there with you in heart and spirit, for I know first-hand what it is like, how hard it is, and how difficult it can be to live when neither conventional nor alternative healthcare really has answers for you.  I know the disruptions it causes in one’s personal, professional, private, and public life. I know how hard it can be every day, and how the suffering just continues and goes on and on, without relief. Know that I love you and hope you can find some measure of peace with whatever difficulties life has brought to you in the challenge of being a self-aware consciousness that is subject to the vagaries of the physical body where entropy always wins, in the end.

A picture containing outdoor, mountain, rock Description automatically generated

Preface

This book is both like, and rather unlike, other books of mine. It’s most similar to my 2014 memoir, Being Infinite, in that it recounts in chronological order events in my personal life, but it has a very different focus and intent. Being Infinite was my account of my life up until 2009 and the process I went through during my nondual awakening and transformation as facilitated by entheogens and set into high gear with 5-MeO-DMT. There, the focus was on how my personal story ultimately transcended my individual egoic identity and expanded into the universal and infinite, and thus the title.

Here, in this book, while entheogens and psychedelics and visionary and nondual experiences play their part, they are not the focus of the narrative that is shared within these pages. This is a retelling, and expansion, of my personal story as viewed through the lens of having developed a chronic medical disorder. As such, this is not a transcendent story. It is one of a very individualized human experience, which is perhaps significant in-and-of-itself in counterpoint to Being Infinite, for as I’ve always stressed, our nondual nature does not, in any way, override or negate our individual human experiences, and this story demonstrates this truth in a dramatic and personal way.

Like other writings of mine that feature myself and my experiences as the main protagonist, this story comes with not only events in my personal life – struggles with romantic relationships, defining events, recurring patterns, and my reactions, thoughts, and reflections on all these things – but also observations and mentions of what has also been going on in the wider world, and my local community. This is all done with my usual style of critique, commentary, and viewpoint. It just so happens that this development of a chronic health condition for myself also coincides with major events, disruptions, and turmoil in the wider world, and as such, it’s all a part of my story as narrated through these challenging and tumultuous times.

As this is a personal narrative, it can be read as a stand-alone book, and one need not be familiar with any of my other books or writings in order to digest the contents or relate to what is shared here. However, many of my other books and projects are referenced numerous times throughout this narrative, so anyone who might be curious of how all this fits in with what else I’ve done can easily find where to turn, what book to grab, and where to find further elucidation of any of the more oblique or casual references made in this story.

For anyone who might be looking for this to be another of my books about entheogens and nonduality and personal transformation and liberation, you’ll be disappointed. This is not a part of the collection of books that I have compiled into a series, The Entheogenic Evolution.  However, anyone who has read from that collection could find much of value and interest here, just as long as it’s clear that this book is not a part of that series. As the minor niche-interest public figure that I am, my regular readers might find this book interesting, and perhaps also surprising, especially if they haven’t been aware of what’s been happening in my personal life.

But one need not have any particular interest in entheogens or nonduality to read this book. Yet, for those who do, and who are interested in psychedelic culture in general, there’s much here for you. Psychedelic culture isn’t a monolith or uniform aggregate, and there are good actors and bad actors here, just like in any social group. In these pages, you’ll get to see a little bit of the darker side of things along with my perspectives on it all in how it has impacted me personally. You’ll see examples of confirmation bias, delusional conspiracy thinking, manufactured outrage, defamation, judgment, and invented accusations, all facilitated via the internet. It’s not all love and light and unity. It’s actually quite messy – kind of like life in general.

Unlike most of my other books, even including my novels, this book isn’t indented to teach you, the reader, anything. There’s no message. I do share my opinions and perspectives on a number of things, so I guess I can’t help myself in that regard, so there are things to be learned, but that’s not the purpose of the book. The ultimate purpose is simply to share my experience of living with a chronic and debilitating medical disorder, trace its history, explore its roots and possible causes, look at correlations, explore different treatments and therapies, and just tell the story of what happened, what it’s been like, and how I’m currently doing with it all. And, in line with many of my other writings on altered states of consciousness, there’s a focus on the phenomenology of experience – a telling of what it all really feels like.

A picture containing grass, outdoor, colorful Description automatically generated

Setting the Stage

This is a story about sleep.

This story doesn’t have a happy ending. It doesn’t necessarily have a horrible ending, either. In truth, it doesn’t have an ending, as much as I might wish it did.

Sometimes, life presents us with nice narrative frames. We can have breakthroughs, cathartic experiences, a-ha moments of revelations, dramatic changes, closure, and resolutions.

This isn’t a story like that.

Though I can’t say that I’ve read many of them, I get the impression that literature and stories about health struggles tend to come with nice, neat, narrative closure, at least at some level. People write stories about how they finally got the diagnosis, treatment, or therapy that they needed to bring a difficult passage in their life to a satisfactory conclusion, whether it was through conventional medicine, or some form of alternative healthcare. In my own field, that of psychedelic medicines, there are countless stories of people finally getting relief from long-standing health challenges, both physical, and mental, through powerful psychedelic experiences. Indeed, I’ve interviewed many such people, have consulted with them, and interviewed many authors who write about the miraculous experiences of others on my podcast. I’ve talked to many people who have had mysterious medical conditions that nothing has been able to help, other than psychedelic therapy, ceremony, or healing. And of course, there are also the stories that people share of how, even though they didn’t overcome their illness, they’ve managed to find great wisdom through their suffering, had their compassion toward themselves and others magnified and distilled into life-changing perspective shifts, where people genuinely praise their illness for helping them see the light, with statements such as my getting cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it forced them to reconsider their life priorities, behavior patterns, and mental structures.

This isn’t one of those stories.

Given that a human life is framed by birth and death, and that we make meaning of our experiences through narratives about the self, and what happens to the self, I think we are prone to look for closure, meaning, and resolution. This is reinforced by personal health narratives where people do have closure and resolution. I’m happy for those people. I’d like it to be the case that I could count myself among them. However, I can’t.

So, this is a story without a nice, neat, resolved ending – kind of like what’s currently happening in the world. Our propensity for narrative structure sometimes obscures the random, messy, inconvenient aspects of life and reality. Sometimes, things don’t work out. Sometimes, suffering persists. Sometimes, there’s no profound message to be received, or life-changing moment of transformation to be embraced. Sometimes shit happens, and continues to happen, and the best we can do is live with it.

This is one of those stories.

I’m writing out this story not because I have any profound insights to share, or because I think this will help others, or because I’ve discovered some miracle method or breakthrough that needs to be heard. I’m writing it out because for one, I’m a writer, and as a writer, I’ve made it a habit of sharing my life experiences in print, but also for the fact that I think it worthwhile to share when things don’t work out, when healing isn’t achieved, and when suffering persists. As such, this can perhaps serve as a counterpoint to some of my other writings. It’s not that I’ve ever claimed that people can fix all their problems, or live in perpetual bliss, happiness, and a life free from suffering. In fact, even though I’ve written numerous books about the profound, transformative, and liberating potential of psychedelic medicines and entheogens, I’ve also always shared that none of these properties of psychedelics magically fix you, your life, or your propensity to suffer, fail, and struggle. There are unquestionable positive results from psychedelic work and therapy, especially with PTSD and mental health issues, and addiction, and other forms of suffering. And there are stories of miraculous cures and the resolution of years of suffering. But it doesn’t work that way for everyone, not all of the time, and we’d all be lying to ourselves if we said that psychedelic medicines were miracle cures with total efficacy, or that liberation from the mental, emotional, and physical traps of the ego somehow made a person impervious to disease, deterioration, or the eventual end to which we are all moving: death.

Honesty and openness are high on my personal priority list. That’s why I’ve shared much of this story already via personal episodes on my podcast, The Entheogenic Evolution, in interviews I’ve given since 2019, and in talks and other writings. There is a pervasive notion in alternative health circles that you can be free from suffering, disease, and struggle if you can just be your authentic, true self, and use the power of your mind to create yourself as you want to be in your highest, most realized form. In my opinion, and experience, that’s narcissistic bullshit. People say you’re suffering because you haven’t acknowledged your shadow, or dealt with your childhood trauma, or maybe even it’s your karma, and what you deserve, at some level. And if you could just properly visualize your good health and success, you’ll have it. Just visualize yourself to perfection! Get everything you ever want, and more! Perfect health is just a visualization away where you can quantum shift into another reality where your life isn’t as fucked up as it is here.

Bullshit.

Hey – maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But that’s the catch, isn’t it? If you don’t have perfect health, it’s your fault.

I’m not a spiritual person. I don’t like woo-woo stuff. I don’t buy into the metaphysics of suffering. I’m a realist. I’m pragmatic. And I’m prone to accepting scientific conclusions about most things. And I also accept that there are times were there are no answers forthcoming. Sometimes, there’s no solution, or at least, the solution hasn’t presented itself yet, if it does exist. Sometimes, there are things that neither mainstream medicine, alternative medicine, or diet, supplements, exercise, and meditation can treat. Again, sometimes things are just fucked up, shitty, and the best you can do is live with it.

It is my hope that one day I’ll be able to honestly and genuinely change my tune on this particular subject as it relates to me and my personal experience. But I’m not there now, and don’t see myself reaching that place any time in the foreseeable future. I’m in the muck of life, and I’ve been there for a while now. It very well may be the case that this is the muck I’m in until I finally shuffle off this precarious mortal coil. I hope not. But I do need to prepare myself for that eventuality, because as things currently stand, that seems to be my most realistic option. If it does shift, you can rest assured that I’ll share all about it just as I’ve done all along – on my podcast, in my writings, and in the interviews I give.

Living a life that is shared online can be deceptive. Because I continue to be active, productive, and available, there’s the impression that my troubles have resolved themselves. They haven’t. They’ve just become more manageable, to some extent, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have cultivated self-employment so that I can continue to do my work, even with my reduced ability and capacity to serve and produce. In fact, these aspects of my being – sharing art, music, interviews, photography, and writings – have helped me make it through my suffering this far. For a time, all of these aspects of my life and being fell away when I was in the more dire phase of my current health crisis. I returned to all these activities as soon as I felt I could, because to continue to engage life was a far better option than just sitting with my suffering. I may be suffering, and experiencing daily challenges, but what the fuck? Life is still for living, even if it isn’t the life that I’d want for myself, or for anyone else, for that matter.

In my mind, I’m imaging that most people reading this already know something of my struggle and health condition. Who knows? Maybe this writing exercise will reach new readers and a different audience. Even for those who already know many of the details of my sleep story will find more in here than I’ve already shared publicly, and at the very least, this is putting it all down in once place – you know, that old desire to have narrative consistency!

But, if you’re expecting a happy ending with a nice resolution, I think I’ve already made it clear that you won’t find it here, because I haven’t found it for myself. So, this is a story without an ending. Dissatisfying, I know, but that’s life – it’s not over until it really is all over.

In telling this story, I’m choosing to obscure some identities, so some of the names used aren’t the real names of the actual people, and some names I forego entirely. The main character is me, and everyone else is just a side character, for the most part. This is a very personal story. I hope in writing it, I might find some interesting revelations, connections, and a-ha moments, but I’m skeptical. I’ve been over all this so many times in my head, that I think it unlikely that I’ll have any breakthroughs here. I’ll let you, the reader, know, at the end of this story if anything like that has happened. Otherwise, I’m just going to tell it like it is, like it was, and how it continues to be. This isn’t so I can garner pity or support. This is just another example of me being me: a perpetual sharer. This isn’t a story to inspire you, or make you wise, or offer clues to the profound nature of being. It’s just a story of what it’s like to live with something that really, truly, sucks. And in that, maybe you can empathize. Maybe life has dealt you a shit hand, too, and the best you can do is live with it. Know that if this is you, my heart is fully with you, ‘cuz I know what it’s like.

Not everything can be fixed.

So, here’s the structure of this story. I’ll start with the crisis. That’s a good narrative device. You know, it’s like when a movie, TV show, or novel has a cold open in the middle of the grand crisis of the story, leaving the viewer or reader immediately wondering: what’s going on here? And how did this happen? Then, usually, the story backs up, and starts to reveal what happened before that grand crisis that put our hero into such dire straits. Eventually, the narrative catches up to the grand crisis, and now the consumer of the story can say, so this is how we got here! Afterwards, comes the resolution to the crisis, generally in the form of some great success and achievement. But, like I’ve said, my story doesn’t work that way. Nevertheless, I’ll follow this format – start with the crisis, jump back in time to reveal what things were like before, then turn to attempts at resolution, and finally, just openly telling what life is like now, sans resolution or solution. Trust me: it dissatisfies me more than it does you, dear reader.

A picture containing mountain, outdoor Description automatically generated

The Crash

In January of 2019 my off switch broke.

It had been malfunctioning and acting wonky for quite some time – indeed, I can now trace its defections back to early childhood, as will be revealed in this narrative exercise – but in January of 2019, it definitively broke.

Now, I know that we, unlike Data on Star Trek, or C3-PO in Star Wars, don’t come with an actual built-in off switch or power down mode. However, we humans do have a feature that we share with countless other life forms called sleep. As I’ve now heard from countless doctors, specialists, and scientists, the general consensus is that we still don’t really understand sleep, and I can attest to the veracity of that statement. If sleep were easy, and well understood, then countless scores of humans across the planet wouldn’t have so much difficulty with the damned thing, yet we do. When sleep goes bad, there are no easy solutions, and the variety of sleep disorders is wider and deeper than any of the solutions that are out there for more relatively mild cases. When it comes to my own case, refrains that I heard from numerous experts were along the lines of, I’ve never seen a case this bad, and, You’re out of my league, and, Your case is very complicated, and I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to help you.

Yeah. That’s right. Not what anyone wants to hear when they have a medical issue.

But I digress. To get back to the specifics of the crisis, when my off switch broke, I went ten consecutive days in January of 2019 without sleep. Ten days of being awake. Ten days of downward spiraling. Ten days of the most concentrated suffering of my life. Ten days of slipping further and further into mental and physical disfunction, deterioration, and loss of basic ability to live and exist. Ten days of horror, terror, and torment.

Let’s start with a basic truth I learned in those ten days: anyone who says that sleep deprivation isn’t real torture has no fucking clue what they’re talking about. It absolutely and unquestioningly is torture, and torture of the most horrible kind. Honestly, as the days and nights wore on, I didn’t expect to make it out alive. It isn’t really possible for me to describe how physically, mentally, and emotionally awful those ten days were. Not only could I not sleep, but I had to force myself to eat, losing some 15 pounds over those ten days. By the tenth day, I was a hollow shell of myself and looked like death, and certainly felt like it, too. The torture was excruciating, and relentless. There was no escape from it. There was no relief, and no way out. It was the totality of my reality. It was horror embodied.

I’ll return to the full day-by-day, night-by-night breakdown later in this story, but for the time being, I’ll jump to the end.

Over the course of the ten days, which I now refer to as the crash, I’d been trying everything I could to help me sleep: meditation, acupuncture, massage, cranial sacral, herbs, supplements, multiple medications, binaural beats, hypnosis – you name it, I tried it. On the tenth consecutive night, not having received relief from any of the prescription medications I’d tried via daily consults and new prescriptions with my general care physician, I thought I’d give the over-the-counter medication of Unisom a try in conjunction with a THC gummy.

The combination was a horror, and it was the last cannabis I consumed for many months, following, and never tried Unisom again.

I’d already effectively lost my shit multiple times by my tenth night of suffering, but this night turned into the absolute worst yet. As everything was coming on and I was lying in bed, listening to binaural beats of delta and theta waves, more than any other experience of my life, I felt as though I was truly losing my mind, and could literally feel my consciousness fragmenting and all rationality breaking apart and shattering on the shore of extreme sleep deprivation.

I wanted to squirm. I wanted to run away. I wanted it all to end.

I was losing it.

Fortunately, I had enough wherewithal to know what to do: just stay symmetrical. Don’t give into the urge to curl into a fetal ball. Don’t give into the urge to toss and turn and squirm. Stay symmetrical. Ride out the waves of horror in balance and poise. Don’t let the ego run the show, as much as it’s crying out to do so.

This is one of my basic teachings on working with entheogenic medicines, and a truly simple, yet profound distinction that I discovered and have since shared about my experiences with 5-MeO-DMT: the ego tends to energetically be embodied with asymmetry, and non-egoic, nondual energy tends towards symmetrical energetic embodiment.

In other words, if you want to prevent yourself from giving in to the ego, when faced with challenging, overwhelming, or powerful energies, rest in symmetry. This makes it much harder (and at times, impossible) for the ego to run your vehicle, and you can more cleanly and efficiently process energy. It’s a relatively simple technique, though it can be hard to put into practice, particularly when things get horrifying, torturous, and mind-breaking. Because when the ego is freaking out, it wants to do something, anything, to change the reality it is enduring, and if at all possible, get away or just make it stop.

And it was the only way I made it through the night, and quite possibly saved my life.

There was the very real potential for me to have killed myself that night.

My whole body was vibrating and shaking violently. Consciously and intentionally, I put myself in rigid symmetry, lying on my back, hands pressed together before me in prayer position (though I wasn’t praying), body vibrating away as wave after horrible, horrendous wave of sensation passed through my being.

Behind closed eyes, visually things started with dark blacks and greens, like looking through moldy Swiss cheese, decaying, rotting, putrefying. Eventually, this scene shattered, and it felt like my mind was splintering, completely out of control, all rationality slipping away. Visons and compelling energies started passing through my awareness: I’d have to kill myself to make this horror stop. The visions were in a loop, alternating between different scenes. In one, I’m lying on the sidewalk, and people in colorful, clown-like clothes and attire are kicking me, mocking me, telling me to just do it – just kill myself and get this over with. In another vision, I see myself getting in my car and driving up one of the nearby winding mountain roads with precipitous drop-offs and cliffs and just punching it over the edge. I also see myself running naked out into traffic (good luck with that in Ashland in the middle of the night – it’s a small town and no 3 am traffic that I know of,