People who take prescription sleep medication put themselves and others into even greater danger. I’ve met two people who were on Ambien, which is a horrible, horrible drug.

One of them was my boyfriend. Once, when we were preparing to go to bed, he shared the following story with me.

“I kept noticing,” he said, “that even when I’d fill the tank of my car in the evening, on the next morning it would be half empty. I had no idea what was going on until one night I discovered myself driving down the highway at full speed at 4 am without having the slightest recollection of how I got into the car and where I thought I was going. I’m on Ambien and I hear that people sometimes do things they can’t remember while they are on it.”

As he finished the story, he took out some pills and prepared to take them.

“What are those?” I asked in horror.

“Well, I just told you, it’s my Ambien,” he said.

“OK, now you will drive me home and then take your Ambien,” I said. “There is no way I’m staying here while you are on those. What if you wake up at night and decide to stick a knife in me? You won’t even go to jail for that because you won’t remember anything.”

“I think I’ll still go to jail,” the boyfriend replied judiciously.

I didn’t feel very comforted by that, though.

I also had a friend who would take Ambien and then start calling classmates to invite them over for sex. Since she had no recollection of what happened, she would then be forced to approach people in class to ask them, “I’m sorry, did we have sex last night?”

Since then, I decided that the best remedies for sleep are natural. Take a walk in the fresh air, have some warm milk with honey, take a relaxing bath. And if none of these remedies work and I don’t fall asleep, then I just won’t sleep. I’ll write and schedule posts for the next week (like I’m doing right now, actually), read a book, explore new apps on my Kindle. Anything is better than giving my mind over to these horrible drugs.

I always had huge issues with sleep, so I want to share my experiences with sleep remedies. When I was an undergrad, falling asleep became so difficult that I decided to experiment with over-the-counter sleep medication. Two attempts at taking it cured me of the desire ever to try again.

The first time I took half a sleeping pill and got into bed, my sister was sitting in my room, chatting me with me. Suddenly, I felt that I was losing control of my limbs. “Get out of the room!” I told my sister. “I’m about to fall asleep!”

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“I took a pill! I’m about to drop off. Get out!” I yelled. What I was experiencing was so weird that I didn’t want my sister to witness it.

“Can you not do this any more?” the poor child asked me on the next day. “You really scared me.”

I decided to stop but then my insomnia got really bad. I had two midterms one day, and the night before I couldn’t get to sleep no matter what I tried. So I took another pill. It didn’t work. I took one more, but it didn’t work either. I gave up and spent the night reading.

On the next morning, I was on the bus, going to school when the pills kicked in. That was a nightmare, people. During the midterms, I could barely hold the pen in my hand. It kept falling out of my fingers. I found it extremely hard to control my limbs.

After those experiences, I never tried another sleeping pill.

(To be continued. . .)