Insomnia. It's not fun to deal with. However, you end up with interesting conversations at 2 and 3am and well into the morning. My roommate & I have been going to bed at around 4 or 5am, sleep for 3 or 4 hours if we can & do it all over again. Last night at around this time we began talking about all sorts of crazy gene related problems (she's pre-med). We ended up googling all sorts of things. For example did you know that there can be females who have XXX chromosomes? Or men who have XYY? So that lead to a lot of googling and wikipediaing (I guess those are actually verbs now, at least google is, that is, I googled...). Then I noticed my brother was on AIM, we talked a bit, then in his sleep deprived state, asked what it would be like to loose all your senses. Woah. My brain couldn't keep up. So asking for assistance I asked my roommate what her thoughts are on the deprivation of the five senses. We decided that it would be torture. You would be trapped in your own brain. Walking is out of the question if you can't feel, the outside world wouldn't exist. It's quite mind boggling, I don't think anyone would know what it's like. For example, when someone is in a coma, they don't really have brain function & when they wake up, they don't have recollection of what it was like, it just a long nap. Then the conversation diffed to, well what if you were born like that? What would thoughts be? We think in our native tongue, what if you didn't know a language? What would the doctors & parents do? All the person could do is sit there, trapped in their own brain. So there we were, three people pondering such questions at 3am.
Note: due to my lack of sleep in the past few weeks, and your perhaps not lack of sleep, all of this may sound crazy. And no we were not stoned while tackling this philosophical question.