It’s been a rough week sleep-wise. I was stressed because my dog was dying; I got called into work on what was supposed to be a day off 12 hours before a project began, which meant I’d slept in the day before thinking I had the next off; I have a cold… so in 60 hours I’d gotten about 7 hours sleep. So taking one of my prescription sleeping pill for the first time seemed like a good idea. It was not.
I took the pill, read for 15 minutes, then turned off the lights and got into bed. I don’t sleep on my back, but I usually start off on it when I go to bed. About 5 minutes after I got into bed, I noticed that there was something wrong with the ceiling. It seemed to be moving. At first I dismissed the idea as the glow in the dark stars fading, but it moved purposefully. Oh, it was a giant spider, about 5 feet across; good thing I’m not really afraid of them. I looked at the window, and there were several wooden marrionettes hanging in it, which is odd, since I don’t own any. The spider wasn’t really bothering me, but there was also something wrong with my clock, which seemed to have blue numbers spinning under it below the normal gold ones. And, as I glanced to my right, I noticed that the room was a. bigger b. full of people. The people looked very much like those in the Muppets Christmas Carol - which made sense since the spider looked like a muppet too- but they weren’t supposed to be there, and they were crowding my bed, which was beginning to upset me. Especially when a really big (3’ wide) gray hand reached across my bed above me. So I began to call for my parents. After a little while I realized that they couldn’t hear me from the oposite end of the house, so I was going to have to go wake one of them up. On some level I knew the muppet people weren’t really there, but I was still worried that they’d try to keep me in the room. Fortunately they didn’t do anything as I left the room. I kept tripping over things because I was dizzy, though.
I woke up Dad and explained to him that it seemed that the sleeping pill I took was causing massive hallucinations, so he had me sit on the couch and watch 24 with him. The show was a little hard to follow because everyone had 4 eyes and 2 noses, but it wasn’t bad. There were no muppets in the livingroom, but my grandfather’s picture was moving, the headphones near the computer were wandering around, it was snowing inside the windowsill near the couch, and there was a face in the door to the entertainment system. Besides worrying that the picture of my (dead) grandfather was going to wave at me -since it was his hands that were moving- it wasn’t as bad as being alone in my room.
An hour or so after I’d taken the sleeping pill I threw up a few times and the hallucinations called it a night. I looked it up this morning, and learned that the rarer side-effects are indeed hallucinations, dizziness, and vomiting. I think this is a big lesson for me: avoid sedative-hypnotic class prescriptions in the future!
Something like this makes me glad I don’t live alone.
)