Posted by Bill McCuistion (198.64.206.92) on September 29, 1999 at 11:22:57:
I have this other friend who went to college at Texas A&M. (People in Texas generally refer to those people as "aggies". The term means what it means.) Anyway, this aggie friend heard a report of a study which said that something like 95% of all reported accidents involving death or injury occured within a 5 mile radius of the home. This disturbed him so much that he moved.
My clusters have two clock features: (1) attacking me exactly two hours after I go to sleep; and (2) attacking exactly two hours before I am scheduled to awake. Knowing this leads to one of two peculiar behaviors: (1) I don't go to sleep (but this only works for so long), or (2) I don't sleep for more than two hours at a time.
The second approach is more sustainable. I know of single-handed around-the-world sailors who go for weeks and months on no more than two hours of sleep at a time. They train themselves to live this way, whether at sea or not. The down-side is that I get really bored with so much time on my hands, which causes stress, which causes headaches, ...
My aggie friend thinks the best approach is to have special clocks built with 23-hour faces. I'd skip the 2-3 AM period. Sort of like buildings without a 13th floor. Maybe randomize sleep-cycles to keep the demon confused.
Another friend, a former Hippie-Mayan Indian from Belize, asked me about my bio-rythmns. Remember those? I said that I had not thought about those since the 70's. Any thoughts on that? I hear the human daily cycle is actually more like 25 hours.
My head hurts when I think about combining the last two theories: Subtract an hour from the clock but make the day an hour longer. Einstein, where are you when we need you?
I know there is already a lot of superstition around clusters, so adding a few more opinions to that body of knowledge can't hurt. After all, superstitions don't just come from nothing. It may be just folk lore but its not nothing. Don't get me wrong, I like science. But when science and Western medicine both fail us, and we're left with the reality of the pain, then its time to start thinking outside of the box. Lobotomies and suicide can't be the only options.