The baby has not been letting us sleep. Some nights he has, but most, not. The sounds of baby farts are accompanied by constant screaming. I called home during the day and heard him in the background. He sounded like a little horn being blown over and over and over. Two nights ago was as bad as it gets. Martha had taken him out of the room, so I could sleep -- which was nice of her. But Nicholas kept screaming and I could still hear him. That was level one screaming: the constant, repetitive, tearless cry that seems to have no end. When it does end, it becomes level two screaming. Level two sounds like the baby is being squashed: a choked, drawn out, cranky scream. After that is level three, which sounds as if the baby is being ripped in half.

I got up when he reached this level. Martha was a zombie, mindlessly rocking Nicholas in the recliner. I picked him up and he continued his tirade for a few minutes. He stopped abruptly. I always find this mysterious. It can't be a lingering pain that causes him to scream because the moment he stopped, the look on his face was beatific. With eyes wide open, he quietly stuck his tongue out a few times and looked around. I changed his diaper and we put him back to bed as though that was where he had been all night. A short time later, he started up again. It's been like this since the first of October. I've had -- or rather my brain has had -- no breaks, no down-time, no dreams except those fleeting, waking dreams I call conceptual hallucinations: absurd ideas that seem reasonable at the time but prove impossible when tested. I walked out of the house with no shoes on thinking that my shoes would be on by the time I stepped outside. (These incidents -- like many dreams -- are difficult to recall, as they fade once their unreasonableness is noticed.) I tried to pick up a stack of books by grasping only the top book. I've had trouble parsing sentences in the newspaper. When I look at distant objects, sometimes near ones appear as the background to far ones. I can't focus.
R6(7)