Parked in a driveway somewhere, I sit in my car waiting for someone. A car pulls up next to mine. I get out, walk around the back of my car and over to the other car’s driver window. The window opens. Gunshots spurt from an Uzi, striking me in the chest.
I fall down, slowly feeling the life leave my body. Things are beginning to go dark. The car pulls away. I die. For a long time, I feel only darkness.
When I wake up, I am slow to realize that it was all just a dream. The images haunt me, though, and for a while all I can think of is what it feels like to die in a dream. I always thought people didn’t actually die in dreams. I wish it had been the first time, but my own death in dreams has become a theme in my nighttime world.
They say that Ambien can cause vivid and intense dreams, but I’ve been having these kinds of dreams way longer that I have taken the popular prescription sleeping pill. They also say Ambien is habit-forming.
It probably is habit-forming, but given the number of nights I’ve suffered without sleep in my life, I’ll take the addiction, bad dreams and all.
One night, I was on a plane that went down. The sensation of the plane falling to the ground seemed so real that when I woke up it took quite a while to convince myself that it wasn’t real.
The worst dreams I’ve ever had involved nuclear explosions. I’ve had three of them in the past year. If you’ve never experienced the sensation of being hit by a nuclear blast, it is like seeing a bright flash then feeling a burst of powerful, hot wind that destroys everything in its path.
Most of the Ambien dreams are ordinary ones, though incredibly detailed and lucid. They’re a lot like watching movies, and often I’m not even in them. They have distinct characters and story lines and I often become emotionally involved with what happens in them.
The dose of Ambien I am on is relatively strong, and it leaves a hangover-like grogginess to the following morning, sans the nausea. I don’t like having to take a pill for something that comes to most people naturally.
Ambien is better than tossing and turning hour after hour until I’m so frustrated I get out of bed and watch infomercials all night, or worse, Will & Grace.
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1 comment:
Interesting about the dreams...
I would like to know more about this drug, however, as the reader might not be familiar with it.
Dosages, prescriptions, side effects, who takes it (kids?) and long term problems.
As the column title indicates the dreams are caused by the drug, well, what kind of dreams does the writer have when not on Ambien?
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