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.