Lullaby And Good Night

My husband is having a terrible time sleeping through the night.  This has been an on and off problem for years, exacerbated by the fact that he has prostate problems which make him wake up to pee more than just once in the night, and, like many control queens, he has trouble getting back to sleep as he starts to review all the problems in his foreseeable future.  He cannot take sleeping pills since he is a recovering alcoholic for whom such potentially addictive devices are off limits.  Me, on the other hand, I have been taking Zolpidem for years, or as it is sometimes better known by its trade name Ambien.  I am totally addicted, but thankful that in all this time my dependency has not escalated so that I feel compelled to take more than one pill a night.  Sleep was once no problem at all; like most youngsters I fell into a deep sleep and woke up in the morning utterly refreshed.  When life became filled with more tension, nature helped me out by introducing masturbation, so that after a healthy orgasm, I rolled over and went sound asleep.  The beauty of sound sleep was marred when I took a job as a nightwatchman when in graduate school, so that I worked from midnight to eight and then went off to graduate seminars, piecing the requisite amount of sleep out of the rest of my day.  If that eight month experience had not irrevocably deranged my sleep patterns, then the careless prescription of a heavy dose of seconal given me by some doctor to assuage my anguished sleeplessness when my first wife died, certainly did.  I well remember the moment years after when I realized I was addicted as I was helping myself to another seconal pill at ten in the morning, and somehow I had the strength to throw the rest down the toilet.  Sleep was patchy after that, sometimes good if the sex was good and the liquor wasn't overwhelming.  And then I was in my fifties I guess and phoned my doctor one morning because I woke up feeling seriously dizzy for which she summoned me into her office.  "You are not going to have a stroke on my watch," she said as she wrote me out a prescription for the Ambien, "sleep is everything."   Years later long after she and I parted company, and I heard that she had left the practice of Internal Medicine to become some kind of specialist, I wrote a note thanking her for making my life wonderful again.  I have slept well every night since.  Almost never in my life have I consciously remembered dreams nor awakened with a dream going on.  I have never had a nocturnal emission to the best of my knowledge.  Peculiarly enough in the last few years I have sometimes awakened as I was experiencing horrible dreams of persecution, hatred, fear inducing threats from humankind and the environment.  That, as many would say, seems reasonable since it reflects my natural sense of catastrophe and my paranoia.  I remember my mother in law telling me starting when she was in her seventies that her sleep was patchy, restless, and never enough, and I am so thankful that has not been my lot.  I cut the pill in two and take the second half when I invariably wake up after four hours. It is a colossal drag to cut them, my arthritic old fingers, my precarious vision, my general nervousness make the grand process of using the little pill cutter an entirely frenzied hour of fear, desperate to make the halves more or less equal, frantic when they are way off.  I suppose I would have better results all around if I read to myself Good Night, Moon when I want to drop off; it worked like a charm when I read to the children.