[Loser]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
. . . and disbeleive the brick wall all you want.

I've actually done this with some success.

A girl, soon to be girlfriend, totaled her car about five hours from town. She had hit a deer, and very nearly reduced it to its constituent elements. Silly little sportscar didn't take it much better, but the girl was okay, mostly.

Anyway, I had already been up about eighteen hours at this point, because it was the weekend and I was staying up for poker.

On the way back, somewhere around twenty-six to twenty-eight hours of sleep deprivation, I started seeing things. This is fairly normal for me, I tend to start hallucinating fairly early in sleep-dep.

For the most part these illusions are pretty easy to ignore. They don't, as a rule, interact with reality, and only exist at the borders between area illuminated by my headlights (or occasionally the lights inside the car) and the darkness beyond.

I did, however, encounter one invigorating exception. The speed limit out here is seventy-five on most interstates, so while driving down the freeway at something close to 85 miles-per-hour I saw a brick house, right across the road, in front of me, at that distance where I could just barely distinguish between light and darkness.

So now I've got a choice, and it was one in which the conscious mind could not play to much of a role, both because it came so quickly and because the conscious mind wasn't exactly in prime decision-making condition. I kept driving.

My reasoning (or post-decision rationalization, it's hard to tell) was that if I stopped for the house and there was no house there, I would have done something awfully foolish, but if I kept driving and hit the house no one could really blame me.

After all, when you leave a house in the middle of Interstate 25 you should expect it to be run through with late-night travelers.

[ February 12, 2004, 11:36: Message edited by: Loser ]