Insomnia

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one night of not falling asleep is not chronic insomnia; it’s acute insomnia, and no one is immune. I know this because it’s 3 a.m. and I have been lying in bed for four hours, tossing, turning, wrestling with the covers, getting up, walking around, and looking at my dog, whose own deep sleep mocks me, and because, out of sheer boredom, I did a Google image search on “insomnia” and came across the following image, part of some sort of report from a 2005 NIH conference on the subject.



I like the implications of the color bars, although in the age of cable TV, they’re increasingly rare. I remember, as a kid, getting up so early on Saturday mornings that the color bars were still on the TV screen. It seems hard to believe, so maybe this is a twisting of my memory, but I think my sisters and I actually watched the color bars before the cartoons came on. How that could possibly have held our attention, I’m not sure.

According to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, CBS Technology Center received an Emmy in 2001–2002 for “Development and standardization of the Alignment Color Bar Test Signal for Television Picture Monitors.” Even insomnia hasn’t driven me to the point of wanting to know what changes were made to the color bars in 2001–2002 from the way they appeared before Super Friends (“Wonder Twin powers, activate!”) on Saturday mornings in the early ’80s.