The Elephant Vanishes, By Haruki Murakami

I heard the faint high pitched beeping of my alarm clock as I opened my sleep covered eyes. I attempted to roll out from under my covers but immediately retreated as I felt the chilly spring air touch my skin. While I was mustering up the motivation to get out of bed, I glanced at my alarm clock. “11:00 AM” it read in boxy, glowing numbers. Had I really slept in that long? I finally rose from my bed, traveling down the stairs to make myself some breakfast. “Hi, girl!” I greeted my dog where she was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. I smiled to myself as I turned on some music, opened the fridge to retrieve some eggs, and turned on the stove. It felt like a fine Saturday morning until I remembered that I had a lacrosse game later

The Elephant Man can, at times, be a tough play to talk about. The production instills a sort of guilt in the audience, seemingly as though they are the culprits of the Elephant Man's emotional isolation from society. This guilt is very likely due to society's tendency to see the disabilities of the disabled person, as opposed to the person him or herself, as The Elephant Man presents this societal problem, among others, with all of the subtleties befitting a train colliding with a merry-go-round.

Human beings have full control over their identities after they have received knowledge and have become shaped from external stimuli. These stimuli include the teaching process of humans which comes through tradition, schooling, and the actions of other humans and the influence of the organisms around them. Andrew Solomon, through “Son,” was able to use his experience of growing up and labeling himself as a gay dyslexic to show how his environment and knowledge had shaped his identity and how it was viewed by others with different identities. In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert was able to explain how the other organisms or humans are able to form new identities for elephants over time by shaping them a new environment and having the elephants process it. In “Mind’s Eye,” Oliver Sacks had different case studies of blindness from different people and was able to show how each one experienced their blindness help shape and express their individual identities. The stimuli that becomes processed by a person in the situations, accounts, and studies of these works assist in the role of explaining the formulation of an identity.

In the short story, The Elephant in the Village of the Blind, there are a group of blind villagers that come across a conflict amongst themselves. The villagers are being introduced to an elephant for the first time in their lives. In curiosity, they all feel different parts of the elephant, observing the different textures and body parts. As they discuss their different views and experiences from touching the elephant their personal ideas created conflicts. As they disagree, it creates an interesting representation of human interaction. In this story, the conflicts that arise between the villagers represent the small bubble of human observation and subjectivity, and how much of human interaction is about competing to be correct in our beliefs because ego and self worth drive how we interact with each other.

George Orwell’s 1930 short story “Shooting an Elephant,” demonstrates the total dangers of the unlimited authority a state has and the astounding presentment of “future dystopia”. In the story, Orwell finds himself to be in an intricate situation that involves an elephant. Not only does the fate of the elephant’s life lie in Orwell’s hands, he has an audience of people behind him cheering him on, making his decision much more difficult to make. Due to the vast crowd surrounding his thoughts, Orwell kills the elephant in the end, not wanting to disappoint the people of Burma. Orwell captures the hearts of readers by revealing the struggles he has while dealing with the burden of his own beliefs and morals.

Thesis: Sleep deprivation can lead to serious health problems, make you forget information, and have a negative impact on the outlook of life.

In This is Water by David Foster Wallace, he emphasizes the need for people to stay awake. While the term does not literally mean to dose off as life passes by, it does go along the lines of being able to be responsive to the discomforting, disheartening, or even the most joyous things in life. The act of staying awake has been so profound that popular literature mimics the struggle most have with “staying wake.” This type of writing can be categorized as creative nonfiction, and is the current predominant genre as a result. DFW states in This is Water, “ the mind being, an excellent servant but a terrible master” adds to the fact that our default setting has nothing to do with logical thinking but everything to do with impulse. This is seen

Sleep deprivation is prevalent in industrialized societies and has been linked to serious health issues and traffic accidents. This essay views sleep and sleep deprivation from five different motivational perspectives in order to gain a holistic understanding of the phenomena. From evolutionary, psychodynamic, behaviourist, cognitive, and hierarchy of needs perspectives, it is inferred that the cognitive and behaviourist perspectives uphold the most merit for gaining understanding into sleep and sleep deprivation. However, it is

Review of The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives by Rosalind Cartwright 224 pages Oxford University Press, USA; * edition (June 24, 2010)

Morgan Manella in the article “Study: A Third of U.S. Adults Don’t Get Enough Sleep” argues that sleep deprivation can have a negative effect in someone’s health. Manella supports her argument by presenting statistics that shows how adults that don’t enough sleep have chronic conditions. The author’s purpose is to raise awareness so that people will sleep more often and have a better health condition.

Sleep was terrifying. Ever since Allie and her mother, Eva, had ran off from her murderous father, Allie had been avoiding falling into the darkness called sleep. Her father was a madman, he convinced Allie from a young age that everything he was doing was for her. Every week, Allie saw another man go into their basement, and never come out. What her father did to these men was left to question.

Success in life is typically measured by the result of what is accomplished during the waking hours. The degree of effectiveness of those hours however, depend on effective rest. “Sleep is integral to the health and well-being of all people” (Wells 233). Sleep is simply defined as the body’s rest cycle – a time to recharge. The widely accepted metric for normal or sufficient sleep is about 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep. When this metric is not met, either through total sleep loss or accumulated sleep debt, the effect can be dire, “Sleep deprivation results in poor memorizing, schematic thinking, which yields wrong decisions, and emotional disturbances such as deteriorated interpersonal responses and increased aggressiveness” (Orzeł-Gryglewska 95). Sleep deprivation hinders the abilities of the mind, harms the body, and shortens length of life.

Throughout all cultures, there is one idea that remains consistently inconsistent; perception. Perception has to do with how something is viewed either from a physical or metaphorical aspect. Due to the vast size of the world’s population; there will always be a difference in ideas, no matter how “big” or “small.” “Elephant in the Village of the Blind” demonstrates how time, perception, and collaboration can be determining factors in how a situation is dealt with or viewed. This short story shows the ways that the exchange of different viewpoints affects one group’s relationship with others. It is important to know how these differences can change and their role in global affairs.

Sleep is a glorified free trial version of death; we don't have to commit to dying just yet. We lie on our warm, cozy queen mattresses motionless for a few hours, while our head rests on the doughy white pillows, our muscles are paralyzed and our breathing is unconsciously monitored through our brain. A scary dream pops out of nowhere, flashbacks of our past come spiraling in our memory, we get to witness movies starring ourselves as the protagonist and surviving in different scenarios. Anywhere from two to ten hours of sleep could just kill our past and make us forget about yesterday. Or we can sleep to relieve the pain or sleep to prepare ourselves for the next day. “ Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” These are wise words said from Mahatma Gandhi; the most peaceful non violent icon that lead India to its independence from British rule. If Gandhi swore by some serious shut-eye to lead his peaceful protests then there’s no reason for you to not keep pressing snooze on your iPhone alarm clock to go tackle your day, peaceful or not. Sleep is more than just snoozing away on a king size mattress with the blanket tucked in and the fan turned on. Sleep is unique and catered to each person differently.

Elephant has long been known as one of man’s best friends, who have peacefully coexisted along with humanity for thousands of years. However, the relationship between the two is no longer in the equilibrium state. In “An Elephant Crackup?”, Charles Siebert discusses the downfall of the elephants. He gives a depiction of the recent raging and violent acts of the elephants among themselves and toward other species, including humans, and presents an educated and almost unexpected explanation to their behaviors. He says elephants are just like us; they have feelings and now are “suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma”(Siebert 354). The similarity that should be something fascinating is now slowly turning them into the immensely savage beasts before wiping them out of existence. Even when the appearance of the words “stress” and “trauma” looks like a serious case of “anthropocentric conjecture”, it provides a totally new vision, a fresh way of looking at the boiling issue of the disappearance and sadistic acts of elephants specifically and wild animals at large. With the help of two powerful essays: “Great to Watch” by Maggie Nelson and “The Power of Context” of Malcolm Gladwell, the issue of the unusual behaviors of the elephants is thoroughly illuminated and its solution no longer seems to be out of human’s reach.