When I can not sleep my first trick is to breathe through my fingers, then through the palms of these hands.

That calms my mind and then my body.

This technique often fails, though, at such times when I bolt awake early in the morning or the middle of the night. This happened last night. My brainstuffs, twitchy and warring, sent flashcackles of shutup through my head.

I have read that blindness in humans is not dark but red. Red waves. Pulsating veins. Endless and infinite patterns heaving and whoring. The only darkness is not blindness but sleep, or death.

I think about blindness when, trying to force sleep, I shut my eyes and keep them shut, summoning and perhaps goading into action the red pools of mush that pour through the thin coat separating one's vision from the world.

As an exercise in forcing sleep I interpret the transmogrifications, as a cloudgazer might do while lying in the grass staring into the sky.

Yesterday morning I was restless and wide awake at too early an hour. I shut my eyes and, as seems typical, the first image that formed was of a woman's breast, her hand partly covering it. It faded lingeringly like the ocular shock of a flashbulb.

I waited for her to move her hand, but the hand evaporated. The breasts became telephone cables, then snow boots, then some kind of dead tree. Two breasts formed, no hands covering them. I last remember a shape approximating a screaming face, similar to the album cover for Pink Floyd's "The Wall." Strangely, this image seems to have sent me back to sleep.

Staring into the back of my eyelids usually reveals non-descript patterns: Amoeba-like squalls reminiscent of a 1970s light show or the bioluminescent phenomenon I saw as a child in the canal off Old Tampa Bay.

It was one of the questions of my youth: what are these sensations called.

In high school I learned the answer: Phosphenes.

I am told that pot, LSD, and other such influences can intensify the phosphenes, but in my experience nothing has made them more intense than simple lack of sleep.

The most memorable drug-induced visions I had were in college. Too much pot too fast had me seeing the words that others spoke. Those words, flitting about like worms on a sidewalk, assumed shapes and colors appropriate to their meaning. Sometimes these forms suited the tone of voice used to speak them.

Words spoken with a sneer had orange fire-of-spit underneath, and wriggled limp from the speaker's mouth to the floor where they disintegrated into the carpet.

Slogans and come-ons spoken by television commercial voices stampeded through the room like a bucking bronc.

Sentences spoken quickly were the most exciting. The sentences, too small for all they tried to contain, shattered. The words blasted out in many directions forming a solar system of incoherent words circling the ambitious suns that caused the explosion.