It was the insomnia plague.

Cataure, the Indian, was gone from the house by morning.

His sister stayed because her fatalistic heart told her that the lethal sickness would follow her, no matter what, to the farthest corner of the Earth.

No one understood Visitacion's alarm.

"If we don't ever sleep again, so much the better,"Jose Arcadio Buendia said in good humor.

"This way we can get more out of life."

But the Indian woman explained that the most fearsome part of the sickness of insomnia was not the impossibility of sleeping, for the body did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory.

She meant that when the sick person became used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past.

Jose Arcadio Buendia, dying with laughter, thought that it was just a question of one of the many illnesses invented by the Indians' superstitions.

But Ursula, just to be safe, took the precaution of isolating Rebeca from the other children.

After several weeks, when Visitacion's terror seemed to have died down, Jose Arcadio Buendia found himself rolling over in bed, unable to fall asleep. Ursula, who had also awakened, asked him what was wrong, and he answered: "I'm thinking about Prudencio Aguilar again."

They did not sleep a minute, but the following day they felt so rested that they forgot about the bad night.

Aureliano commented with surprise at lunchtime that he felt very well in spite of the fact that he had spent the whole night in the laboratory gilding a brooch that he planned to give to Ursula for her birthday.

They did not become alarmed until the third day, when no one felt sleepy at bedtime and they realized that they had gone more than fifty hours without sleeping.

"The children are awake too," the Indian said with her fatalistic conviction.

"Once it gets into a house no one can escape the plague."

They had indeed contracted the illness of insomnia.

Ursula, who had learned from her mother the medicinal value of plants, prepared and made them all drink a brew of monkshood, but they could not get to sleep and spent the whole day dreaming on their feet.

In that state of hallucinated lucidity, not only did they see the images of their own dreams, but some saw the images dreamed by others.

It was as if the house were full of visitors.

Sitting in her rocker in a corner of the kitchen, Rebeca dreamed that a man who looked very much like her, dressed in white linen and with his shirt collar closed by a gold button, was bringing her a bouquet of roses. He was accompanied by a woman with delicate hands who took out one rose and put it in the child's hair.

Ursula understood that the man and woman were Rebeca's parents, but even though she made a great effort to recognize them, she confirmed her certainty that she had never seen them.

In the meantime, through an oversight that Jose Arcadio Buendia never forgave himself for, the candy animals made in the house were still being sold in the town.

Children and adults sucked with delight on the delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite pink fish of insomnia, and the tender yellow ponies of insomnia, so that dawn on Monday found the whole town awake.

No one was alarmed at first.

On the contrary, they were happy at not sleeping because there was so much to do in Macondo in those days that there was barely enough time.

They worked so hard that soon they had nothing else to do and they could be found at three o'clock in the morning with their arms crossed, counting the notes in the waltz of the clock.

Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia for dreams, tried all kinds of methods of exhausting themselves.

They would gather together to converse endlessly, to tell over and over for hours on end the same jokes, to complicate to the limits of exasperation the story about the capon, which was an endless game in which the narrator asked if they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they answered yes, the narrator would say that he had not asked them to say yes, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they answered no, the narrator told them that he had not asked them to say no, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they remained silent the narrator told them that he had not asked them to remain silent but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and no one could leave because the narrator would say that he had not asked them to leave but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and so on and on in a vicious circle that lasted entire nights.

When Jose Arcadio Buendia realized that the plague had invaded the town, he gathered together the heads of families to explain to them what he knew about the sickness of insomnia, and they agreed on methods to prevent the scourge from spreading to other towns in the swamp. That was why they took the bells off the goats, bells that the Arabs had swapped them for macaws, and put them at the entrance to town at the disposal of those who would not listen to the advice and entreaties of the sentinels and insisted on visiting the town.

All strangers who passed, through the streets of Macondo at that time had to ring their bells so that the sick people would know that they were healthy. They were not allowed to eat or drink anything during their stay, for there was no doubt but that the illness was transmitted by mouth, and all food and drink had been contaminated by insomnia.

In that way they kept the plague restricted to the perimeter of the town.

So effective was the quarantine that the day came when the emergency situation was accepted as a natural thing and life was organized in such a way that work picked up its rhythm again and no one worried any more about the useless habit of sleeping.

It was Aureliano who conceived the formula that was to protect them against loss of memory for several months.

He discovered it by chance.

An expert insomniac, having been one of the first, he had learned the art of silver work to perfection.

One day he was looking for the small anvil that he used for laminating metals and he could not remember its name.

His father told him: "Stake."

Aureliano wrote the name on a piece of paper that he pasted to the base of the small anvil: stake. In that way he was sure of not forgetting it in the future. It did not occur to him that this was the first manifestation of a loss of memory, because the object had a difficult name to remember.

But a few days later he discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in the laboratory.

Then he marked them with their respective names so that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify them.

When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and Jose Arcadio Buendia put it into practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village.

With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair; clock, door; wall, bed, pan.

He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana.

Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.

Then he was more explicit.

The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk.

Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.

At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS.

In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written.

But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.

Pilar Ternera was the one who contributed most to popularize that mystification when she conceived the trick of reading the past in cards as she had read the future before.

By means of that recourse the insomniacs began to live in a reality built on the uncertain alternatives of the cards, where a father was remembered faintly as the dark man who had arrived at the beginning of April and a mother was remembered only as the dark woman who wore a gold ring on her left hand, and where a birth date was reduced to the last Tuesday on which a lark sang in the laurel tree.

Defeated by those practices of consolation, Jose Arcadio Buendia then decided to build the memory machine that he had desired once in order to remember the marvelous inventions of the gypsies.

The artifact was based on the possibility of reviewing every morning, from beginning to end, the totality of knowledge acquired during one's life.

He conceived of it as a spinning dictionary that a person placed on the axis could operate by means of a lever, so that in very few hours there would pass before his eyes the notions most necessary for life.

He had succeeded in writing almost fourteen thousand entries when along the road from the swamp a strange looking old man with the sad sleepers' bell appeared, carrying a bulging suitcase tied with a rope and pulling a cart covered with black cloth.

The old man went straight to the house of Jose Arcadio Buendia.

Visitacion did not recognize him when she opened the door and she thought he had come with the idea of selling something, unaware that nothing could be sold in a town that was sinking irrevocably into the quicksand of forgetfulness.

He was a decrepit man.

Although his voice was also broken by uncertainty and his hands seemed to doubt the existence of things, it was evident that he came from the world where men could still sleep and remember.

Jose Arcadio Buendia was found sitting in the living room fanning himself with a patched black hat as he read with compassionate attention the signals pasted to the walls.

The old man greeted him with a broad show of affection, afraid that he had known him at another time and that he did not remember him now.

But the visitor was aware of his falseness.

The old man felt himself forgotten, not with the irremediable forgetfulness of the heart, but with a different kind of forgetfulness, which was more cruel and irrevocable and which he knew very well because it was the forgetfulness of death.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from one hundred years of solitude

What the characters of this story experienced is remarkably similar to what a methamphetamine user experiences when the use of methamphetamine becomes so pervasive that it consumes the methamphetamine users life.

The excess and continual use of methamphetamine while not necessarily causing excessive memory loss causes the human brain to run in a cyclic pattern of thought that cycles back upon itself repeatedly interjected with hallucinogenic day dreams.

The methamphetamine user after many hours of wakefulness is about as close to the zombies portrayed in horror movies as a human can be. The methamphetamine user is walking around in a state of consciousness that does not make use of higher brain functions. The methamphetamine user may as well given themselves frontal lobotomies. It is very probable that this condition of consciousness is more in line with the thoughts of a monkey that has not slept for several days.

Clinically chronic methamphetamine use could be called a form of insanity.

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