Awake

It's 6.34am, Saturday, 13th October 2007. Public Holiday.

Accidentally fell asleep at about 11pm the night before and woke up at 4.30am today. Not even 7 hours of sleep. Why am I awake (and opting to stay awake) so freaking early?

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Awake - a man named Clive Wearing, sufferer of one of the worst cases of memory loss. Suffering from retrograde amnesia, the inability to remember the past, yet also unable to form new memories about the present. He sees something or talks to someone, but barely remembers it for a few seconds. He blinks and the next moment he forgets what that thing is for, who that person is, or that they had a conversation. For him it is "Forever today".

Desperate on wanting to make sense of what was happening, he started keeping a journal. However, every line and entry was similar. Hundreds and hundreds of such pages.

But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake. . . . 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake. . . . 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.

Read more about him through this article titled "The Abyss - Music and amnesia" by Oliver Sacks in The New Yorker.