Your monitor’s on, but you’re not home. Your mouse is not your own.

You can’t sleep, you can’t eat. There’s no doubt you’re in deep. The space is tight, you can’t breathe, another Zod is all you need.

You’d like to think that you’re immune to this stuff, oh yeah. It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough.

You know, you’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to Snood.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you may want to stop reading right now. It isn’t a new drug, but it has been known to cause dilated pupils, numbness of the index finger and loss of appetite. This isn’t the kind of snood that holds your hair in place or the kind that dangles from a turkey’s beak. It’s Snood, with a capital S, possibly the most addicting computer game since Tetris. And it’s everywhere.

The outbreak here can be traced back to the University of Maine campus, though there probably were a few isolated Snood cases among Internet-savvy teens in the area who downloaded the shareware game before it gained a cult following among the Abercrombie set. It started innocently enough. Students would download it, other students would see them playing it, and they’d download it, too. Then they’d go home for semester break and download it on their parents’ computers. Curious family members would try it out and, pretty soon, they’d be hooked.

“I used to play it all the time and I couldn’t sleep,” said Anna LaRoche, 19, a UM sophomore from Greenville who decided to delete it from her computer. “I wouldn’t do anything. I just sat there and played it. … [In the summer] I would come home from work and my mom would be up in my room, saying ‘Hi Anna, just playing Snood.’ I couldn’t get away from it.”

People have a love-hate relationship with the game. It’s mindless and skillful at the same time, plus, it’s fun. The object of the game is to clear the screen by shooting little, brightly colored animated heads, called Snoods, at different angles. Once you have three of a kind, they disappear. It sounds simple, but it can get hard. Way hard. Hexagon City hard.

“It took me forever to beat Hexagon City, and I was really impressed when I did,” said Amy Appleton, a UM freshman from Etna who’s in the honors program.

Hexagon City, for the unSnooded, is level 23 in the puzzle mode, and it’s pretty hard to beat. But that’s what keeps people playing it. It looks so easy, but it’s not.

“If you play one game, you’ve gotta play a lot, until you beat a high score, and you can’t stop until you’ve done it,” said Eric Rousseau, a freshman at the University of Southern Maine who was in Orono visiting his girlfriend. “It’s the challenge [of] trying to beat certain levels.”

LaRoche said the challenge is what makes Snood so satisfying.

“[When you finish a level] it’s like you’ve accomplished something.”

This isn’t enough to convince LaRoche’s roommate, Brandi Redding of Calais. She refuses to play Snood, let alone download it.

“It’s not hard for me because I see other people who are like, ‘Ah, I can’t get away,'” Redding said.

“You’ve seen the negative effects of Snood,” LaRoche said, laughing.

“It’s like a drug,” Redding replied.

“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t do their homework because of it,” LaRoche said, “But people don’t eat. They don’t go to lunch. People were like, ‘Don’t do it, don’t download it.’ I was like, ‘It won’t be that bad.’ Little did I know.”

When he wrote Snood five years ago, David Dobson didn’t mean to start an addiction. He just wanted to make a game for his wife, Christina, who loved Tetris and solitaire games.

“I didn’t start out to make it addictive, but I think there’s something about the structure of it – there’s always something you can do better,” Dobson said in a phone interview. “People have blamed me for costing them their job, but I haven’t been sued yet.”

Dobson, now 31, is a geology professor at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C. He’s been writing computer games for years in his spare time, but none as successful as Snood. It has more than 30,000 registered users who have paid a $14.95 fee, including the likes of author Michael Crichton and film director Nora Ephron. However, that’s less than 1 percent of the people who have downloaded the game for no charge from www.snood.org. It’s shareware, an honor system that lets you try a game free for 30 days. If you like it, you’re supposed to pay to keep it, but most people don’t.

During the game, little poems pop up reminding unregistered users to pay, such as “Dave’s got kids, they sure are neat. Please register Snood so they can eat.” And when the game starts up, a high-pitched voice implores “Pleeeeeze,” which some people mistake for “sneed” or “thief.” But Dobson isn’t really trying to make people feel guilty. Of course, he’d like it if people would register, but when he wrote the game, he thought he’d be lucky if he made enough money from it to take his wife to dinner.

“It’s already been more successful than I ever thought it would be,” Dobson said. “I was in college. I know it’s sometimes hard.”

Becky Rand, who owns Becky’s Diner in Portland, can’t bring herself to pay for Snood. She’s a grownup. She’s responsible. She can afford it. She’s just afraid of what might happen if she buys it.

“We’ve dumped it six times and someone downloads it again,” she said. “If I pay for it, I’ll feel like I can’t dump it.”

Like most adult Snoodaholics, Rand found out about the game from one of her six children. And like most Snoodaholics in general, she finds herself sitting up late at night, Snooding.

“I’m a busy woman. I don’t have time for this,” Rand said. “You say, ‘OK, just one more game,’ and it’s never just one game.”

Some days, when she has to go in to the diner at 3 a.m., Rand will tell herself she’ll only play until 10 p.m. She’ll start playing and then, like some strange time warp, she’ll look up at the clock to find that it’s time to go to work.

“I have to trudge in sleepless,” she said. “It’s pretty embarrassing.”

On the myriad Snood-related Web sites, many people have suggested forming a support group, invariably called Snoodaholics Anonymous, to help people break free. But the problem is, people love Snood. As far as addictions go, it’s relatively harmless. It’s a guilty pleasure that people just can’t seem to give up.

“I swear it seems like there’s going to have to be a group to help people,” Rand said, half-kidding. “I don’t gamble or do anything like that, but this is as close as I get to illegal activity: Snooding.”

The most prevalent side effect of Snooding is hallucinations. When people close their eyes, the Snoods – which go by the names of Zod, Mildred, Jake, Grover, Midoribe, Geji, Sunny, Spike and Numbskull – flash against the black backdrop of their eyelids.

“If I’ve been playing at night and I go to bed, I can see them when I close my eyes,” Appleton said.

Amanda Gilbert, a freshman from Saco, had a different problem.

“[She] used to think that people looked like different Snoods,” said Gilbert’s roommate, Barbara Sanchez of Natick, Mass. “It was bad for a little while. We were pretty Snood-obsessed.”

“It’s everywhere,” Sanchez said.

“Everyone has Snood,” Gilbert agreed.

“It’s an epidemic,” “Sanchez replied.

“I’d like to take it off my computer,” said Gilbert, who has cut back drastically on her Snooding, “but I just can’t do it.”