This is exactly how my cats like to handle mornings. I love this.

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credit: Simon Tofield, Tandem Films

I’ve had insomnia troubles for years. It can take me hours to fall asleep and I can wake several times during the evening. I’ve tried all kinds of shit, earplugs, caffeine abstinence, exercise, etc. Lately, it’s been the worst ever, enough for doctor to prescribe me Ambien. I’ve been taking it for about two months and the stuff is great shit. I pop a pill and in about twenty minutes I drop like a sack of meat and stay that way till morning; waking with no residual grogginess. I love Ambien, but I’m reluctant to take it often. Reliance on prescription drugs to sleep is probably not the best course to pursue.

Anyway, what I usually do is take Ambien during nights where I have to work the next day, that way I don’t show up at the office completely cracked out from only two or three hours of fitful sleep. Over the weekend, I try not to take Ambien, trying just to relax or at the very least, test how bad the insomnia is currently.

One thing I’ve been looking into is hypnosis and the use of binaural sound to induce relaxation and/or sleep. I purchased my first binaural recording about fifteen years ago and I’ve been collecting them here and there since then. I find that some headphones and some binaural sound on loop can really put me down into a light trance state at times making it much easier to sleep or at the very least, relax.
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I’ve been using the nicotine patch in yet another effort to quit smoking. For about a week now that I’ve worn it, my quality of sleep has been very fitful due to the fact that my body is getting nicotine pumped into it as I slumber (I normally don’t smoke while I’m asleep). The general feeling of being wired, coupled with vivid and usually lucid dreams have me feeling a serious deficit in quality rest.

So, I’ve taken to using over the counter sleeping pills to knock my ass out. I’ve gone for the non-habit forming ones. Specifically Unisom and a generic knockoff. I started off with the generics, which were these two little blue pills. They worked well enough. Instead of waking ten or twelve times a night, I’d only be awake once and then only for a few minutes. I arose feeling fine, with no after-effects and it seemed like a solution for the next two weeks till I downgrade to a patch of lesser potency.

Last night, I tried Unisom. You take this single blue pill, which I did before getting in bed. Again, as with the generics, I felt that my quality of sleep was improved, but my condition this morning, or more precisely, early afternoon is pretty different. I’ve felt like I’ve been a zombie-like, semi hypnotic state all morning. I occasionally snap out of it, sitting at a table, coffee in hand after having lost the past four minutes of my life to La-La Land.

Even now, as I write this, I keep drifting off and snapping back (or more descriptively, slogging back) to my laptop. The air in my apartment has a strong and pronounced odor of burning plastic that suggests the possibility of a fire somewhere in my building, but sheeeeeeeee-it.

Wait…huh?

See? That had to have been two to three minutes of disconnected, spaced-out shit. I have to read back through this paragraph to remember what I was writing about.

Burning plastic smell! What the hell?

I think I’m done with Unisom.