Ambien (posted hours late)

Two decades ago I was stumbling through life with extreme insomnia.  Sleeplessness had been a part of my life since my early twenties when the comfortable easy pattern of night time sleep was deranged by a job I took whilst at graduate school.  In my second year the Harvard classics faculty voted to cancel my tuition scholarship--I had really performed badly--and I found a full time employment to replace the money lost with a night watchman's job in a local department store warehouse from midnight to eight.  This had the advantage that I would be free to attend seminars, and, since a watchman makes rounds once an hour, I had a lot of time for studying during the night.  My sleep was sandwiched in between the class meetings, and as a consequence I became subject to uneasy sleep--dramatically increased by the tragic and sudden death of my first wife--which translated over the next thirty years into on again off again insomnia.  I tried handling this with valium until I seemed to go mad one night, and threw the rest of the prescription bottle into the trash.  Then my simple home remedy was heavy drinking in the evening which helped as anodyne against the anxieties of fatherhood, teaching, getting tenure by writing scholarly bullshit, managing the life of a father and husband, while occasionally looking for a male to satisfy other carnal urges.  By the time I was sixty sleeplessness was my cross to bear until one day my new primary care physician to whom I had been summoned because I complained of extreme dizziness prescribed for me something called Ambien.  Could that really have been twenty odd years ago?  I have been addicted ever since.  And, it is also true, that I have enjoyed decades of uninterrupted sleep at night, the joy of waking refreshed every day, the strength to write during this period of time three books, numerous articles, and book reviews, not to mention continuing with my teaching career.  I do not for a moment think that Ambien has dulled my brain; on the other hand, I assign to the passage of years the obvious deterioration of my short term memory---I think of my poor long suffering husband's frequent admonition: "You've already told me that."  Readers of this blog will know, as I just noticed in looking back through earlier posts, that the anecdote of falling on 57th street appears at least twice.  Several years ago the newspapers reported on the danger of Ambien users being subject to hallucinations and nighttime journeys, even driving cars while asleep or semi awake.  It all seemed fanciful until it happened to me.  After my surgery I was distinctly told not to take Ambien for the first few days when I was, as it was not described to me but in retrospect I know it to be true, still under the influence of the powerful anesthesia that four to six hours of surgery had required.  I irrationally disobeyed, and in the night in my sleep I hallucinated the arrival of two beautiful girls who insisted that we were in Los Angeles and must go to "the Sunset Strip" where all the dance clubs were.  So I got up from bed, took my car keys down from the hook and proceeded downstairs three flights to our car, and then everything is hazy, clearly I did move the car in the numbered parking spot since it is a little crookedly parked, but on the other hand I don't think I actually left the spot other than to turn the engine on, and indeed leave the lights on.  The next thing I know was I had awakened my husband thinking I was in some attic filled with familiar furniture which for some reason I thought was stacked and stored.  He quickly woke up completely, took charge, turned off the car lights, took the car keys away for the next two weeks, and hid the Ambien for the next ten days.  That was March.  Life now is back in the placid trough of gentle untroubled repose.