syn·aes·the·sia

A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.

Well, folks, this is what happens to you when you average about 3-4 (interrupted) hours of sleep per night for a week and then descend even further and find yourself with only 4 hours of sleep in 48 hours by the end of it. Let's look at a few reasons why that could be, shall we?

• You may be unable to sleep because you dictate blog posts to yourself at night, posts which you know you will never remember in the morning but are oh so important to phrase just right in your head in the dead of the night...night after night after night.

• You may be unable to sleep because you are trying to buy your first house and 3 a.m. is obviously the perfect time to draw diagrams in your head and compare nonexistent paint colors.

• You may be morphing into an insomniac because your obsessive-compulsive-pessimistic-skeptical-nihilistic self just knows something is going to go wrong with the aforementioned home buying endeavor. But what? At which stage? Who will give you the bad news? Can you really trust the people you are working with?

• You just may be ready to give up on sleep anyway because even the nights you did get 4 or so hours, you were up twice with the baby.

• You may think that after it dawns on you (following a huge spat with your hubby on a four-hour car ride) that you have only had 4 hours of sleep in the last 48, you better leave your party early and sleep the whole car ride back because that would be a good way to begin your catch up sleep.

• But you may be at a family reunion that day and your long-lost relatives from the other side of the country just may show up unexpectedly to surprise everyone, and you may be having such a great time talking with your 20-year-old cousin with a lip ring and a huge tattoo who thinks that people in your part of the country have never seen such things and of course everyone must be staring at him, that you may forfeit an early departure in exchange for amusing conversation.

• And probably after you end up finally dragging your family in your vehicle at 11 p.m. to begin the long journey home, your body just might decide that it is not be able to sleep on the road at that time.

• So your husband may decide to play Neil Diamond in the van and very slowly the lyrics to Cracklin' Rosie may start to take the shape of a boot.

• Guitar riffs turn into millions and millions of bursting triangles.

• Kentucky Woman becomes a graph of rainbow-colored hearts.

• You might think at first that Song Sung Blue is perfect for dancing amoebas, but you will probably quickly realize that they are NOT dancing amoebas but are, in fact, exploding pointy nerve cells.

• After you explain this all in gruesome detail, the next morning your husband might get all the children ready for church by himself, find a kind lady to watch them in church while he performs his Eucharistic Minister duties, and let you sleep until 1 in the afternoon.

• And then he might make you lasagne.

• In the shape of a rectangle.