CONFESSIONS OF A MIND OUT OF TIME.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I try not to take my discomfort with this morning's shift to daylight- saving time too personally. However, I suspect the entire process is an elaborate charade engineered simply to make me nuts.

Once a year, we wake millions of sleep-deprived people an hour early and force them to stumble into their automobiles and operate these large heavy machines at high speed - in the dark! Presumably we do this because, after the grumpy survivors have had eight hours to wake up, we want them to be able to find their way home at the end of the day in daylight.

Does this make any sense to you?

Maybe I'm a little cranky because I had to get up an hour early this morning. But it's not just the spring-forward that grates against my sense of justice - the fall-back insults my logic as well. Twice a year, no matter what time it is, we decide it isn't the right time so we add an hour or we subtract an hour, and for what?

It's not as if in the summer there are 25 hours in a day. I could understand that. But a day is 24 hours long, even in December. Why are we moving the clock around? We're not actually saving daylight. There's no ``light bank'' any more than there is a Social Security Trust Fund. So what are we saving, hydrogen?

I don't know if our government Department of Clocks is aware of this, but at midnight the sun is still up there mashing billions and billions of hydrogen atoms every second just as if it were high noon. It's just doing it in the dark now.

You know who invented this somnambulist's nightmare? The Germans. They created this brilliant time-shifting system to increase industrial production during World War I. During World War II, they even invented ``double daylight-saving time.'' I don't want to sound too negative, but the Germans lost both those wars. So why are we copying them?

I've heard a dozen excuses for this insanity, and none of them adds up.

I've been told we change the time so that during the winter schoolchildren will be coming home in the daylight. But they're still going to school in the dark! I've heard the shift blamed on farmers, but farm animals don't punch a clock. If the sun is up, so are the cows.

And perhaps in the decades before clock radios and happy-dappy TV morning shows like ``Good Day L.A.,'' we saved some energy by rising in the dark, dressing in silence and eating a bowl of cold cereal before dawn. But it's not 1800 anymore. Coffee makers, electric toothbrushes and toasters roar away every morning. And Jillian Barberie is a little loony whatever the hour she's on. What little electricity we save at 5 p.m., we more than burn up at 5 a.m.

So why are we doing this?

It's as if we are insulting Mother Nature to her face. For 360 million years, every living creature on the surface of this planet has obeyed the sun. Trilobites wiggling through the Cambrian ooze developed multifaceted eyes to track the big yellow ball in the sky, not to read a digital watch. Modern bears hibernate not because it's January, but because the sun is low in the sky. And Neolithic neophytes did not build Stonehenge to replace the sun but to keep track of it.

And then about 80 years ago humans announced we could do better. But have we?

Our constantly meandering clock presents a fundamental issue of trust with our children. First, we teach them how to tell time and then we change the rules. Between the tooth fairy and daylight-savings time, we've turned childhood into one long horrible lie. No wonder teenagers refuse to listen to us.

And consider the health damage produced by this annual imposition of sleep deprivation - irritability, a loss of mental focus, short-term memory loss and a loss of mental focus. That's how wars begin, you know. Like that war between those guys and those other guys. Not to mention the increase in - what's the word? Paranoia, I think. Yeah, that's it. Paranoia, which is your right. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

The truth is that Timex is behind all of this. In league with Swatch. Remember, the most vulnerable part of a wristwatch is the adjustment knob. Is that a coincidence? I think not.