Corey Watts M.D.

And it's time for another honorary title.  I found the loophole.  Again.  For some time now I've had trouble sleeping.  I trace it back to the tragedies of '07, but that's not entirely true.  I had some trouble sleeping before then.  It's just that since then, I've had a bit more.  Sometimes, like in this last week, I stay awake for two days, then sleep for a few hours, then stay up for another day or two.  It isn't by design.  I love sleep.  But when my head hits the pillow, I am basically flipping a coin.  Sometimes I feel that weight behind my eye lids and fall into a deep and gratifying slumber.  And the rest of the time I just see my inner screen blurring by with thought upon thought upon thought. 

But now, I am a certified sleep doctor.  Because I found the cure.  "Star Trek Voyager"  my friends.  It'll put a meth addict to sleep after the first hit of the day.  Just waking up after a bender and feeling totally refreshed, hitting the pipe or whatever they do and popping in the old Star Trek Voyager dvd and falling right to sleep.  It really is a powerful sedative.

Now it's possible that me watching voyager coincided with the circumstance of me being flat exhausted.  Possible.  But this isn't the first time it's happened.  Like any good scientist, I didn't draw the correlation between voyager and sleep right away.  Kinda like how people watched apples fall out of trees for centuries before working out gravity.  So I'm kinda like Isaac Newton.  In a sense.  And like Ike, I'm a good scientist (I am not a scientist at all, actually).  I carefully considered all of the factors before forming a cogent hypothesis. 

The first thing that popped into my head was that it was only when I was of a limited capacity to reason that I popped Voyager in, and my capacity to reason is seldom compromised, so it was easy to find the correlation between lack of sleep and this choice of entertainment.  But that was at first.  As I noticed that every time I played the dvd, I had to scour my memory to remember where I left off, it occurred to me that I was falling asleep during the programming.  With all the time I've spent on this boat-much of which is spent in the galley parlor watching dvd's-I've gone through a few.  I even made it through Future Zone and Future Force without falling asleep.

So, having watched every dvd on the boat, including the Tyler Perry movies June likes to bring, it is only the Voyager series that is putting up a fight.  A word about Tyler Perry.  If you don't watch these, I can't blame you.  But if you have watched them, then you'll understand what I'm about to say.  Every one has gotten me.  There's always a point when the dialogue and acting is just so powerful.  I can't explain what it is.  But I've seen like four of them and they all got me.  So there you go.  They look silly to me in the trailers and stuff, but I find that I always enjoy them.

So, you can go around taking your ambien and Tylenol PM and benadryl to fall asleep.  One episode of Voyager is like two xanax.  Easily.  And have you ever shamelessly spilled water on yourself when drinking?  I don't mean shamelessly drinking a lot of water and finding that you had a little spill.  I'm talking about just guzzling some water out of a too big cup and feeling it seep around your mouth and on to your chest but deciding in that brief period that you'd rather deal with the spill than stop drinking.  Maybe you're making some guttural noises too?  It's kind of like scratching an itch when you know it's making it worse but it just feels so good you can't stop.  Ya that happened.  I kinda thought it was funny how I didn't spill on accident and didn't stop when I noticed, but decided consciously that I didn't care and needed that full twenty ounces of water now.  In sleep medical school they said it was good to hydrate.