I have sleep… issues. Any time stress is introduced into my life, sleep goes out the window. Stress like, say, my husband going into the hospital. Or my baby going into the hospital. Or my husband going back into the hospital. (It was quite a year for medical bills.) Without the aid of medication, it could have been theoretically possible for me to have gone most of last year without sleeping.

I love me some Ambien. (And our bank account loved it when Ambien finally went generic.)

But here’s the deal: one of my super powers is that my body can acclimate to just about any medication. Meds will work for a little while, but then I will invariably require larger doses to maintain any sort of effect. This is true for all drugs. I would make a really awesome drug addict. Or a really crappy one… depending on how you look at it.

Now, here is where the hilarity comes in.

As my doses of Ambien go up, so do the occurrences of odd behavior on my part. As my body acclimates to high doses of sleep aides, I sorta do a lot of weird stuff in my sleep… except I’m not really asleep. (And though I appear to be awake, I’m really not awake, either. I guess I’m kind of like a hypnotized zombie, except with a little less of the rotting flesh.)

For your guffawing pleasure, a list of some things I’ve done after taking Ambien:

* Eaten large amounts of snacks. I wake up covered in wrappers of things I have no recollection of eating.

* Watched a wide array of movies which I have no recollection of watching. (I have been known to say many times “I watched that, but I was on Ambien, so I’m not sure if it was any good…”

* Read chapters of books that I don’t remember reading, resulting in the rereading of many, many pages. This is especially tedious when I have to backtrack through my Kindle.

* Made out with my husband, with little-to-no morning-after memory.

* Made out with someone other than my husband. (kidding… just seeing if you’re paying attention.)

* Confided in my husband that I miss my relationship with my younger brother, and declared my love of tiger prawn shrimp… in the same sentence.

* Held a conversation with my mother-in-law where I explained to her that there is a village in Africa where the birth rate of twins is the highest in the world because the people of the village eat a lot of yams. I then told her of my plan to eat lots of yams in order to try for twins. (Sadly, I did remember parts of this conversation the next morning.)

* Posted blog posts that I had to take down the next morning, due to their incoherent nature. One of them may have been about yams and their impact on reproduction…

* Fell off of my exercise ball in the middle of a set of crunches, smashing my face into the television screen during an episode of Law and Order. I got a good look at Detective Green’s pores.

Apparently this “super power” and odd behavior runs in my family. Talking to one of my aunts at Christmastime, she told me about her post-Ambien affinity for eating make-up, and about the time her kids found her out raking leaves and doing moderately strenuous yard work at 3am.

When I start eating eye shadow, it might be time to dial it down a notch.

Until then, for the sake of sleep, I’ll carry on with the occasional loony behavior… and just hope no one films it.

4 Comments »

1. Lol, I have done the making out with your husband with no ability to recall it in the morning. Or it just kind of seems like it might of been a dream. He thinks it’s pretty funny. I enjoyed this post:)

   Comment by Alice Holyoak — January 13, 2010 @ 5:40 pm

2. Oh my gosh, Suzanne. Alice has been making out with YOUR husband!

   Comment by Jenna — January 14, 2010 @ 4:55 pm

3. I love and miss ambien moments. I’m pretty sure Porter does too. =)

   Comment by Diana — January 15, 2010 @ 10:37 am

4. I do these kinds of things after multiple raspberry lemon drops. Possibly the same cost, though at least yours might be covered by insurance.

   Be careful, or at least start videotaping.

   Comment by stephanie (bad mom) — January 15, 2010 @ 7:26 pm

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