When I’d eaten all the Ambien my mother gave me from her surplus, I went back for the rest of what she had. I tried to make these last longer, by forgetting. I took the bottle into another room, to keep them farther from my body. I would take half a pill, a third, though sometimes this would just instigate again the idea that I had not taken enough, and keep me up inside it, waiting to take the other half. Some nights the gap herein would be enough to reduce the effect that it came not at all. Quickly taking a half or whole pill, by mood or building tolerance, might seem diluted. Even in the grips of it beginning to come on, one might disremember how much has already been eaten, how much the air around one’s skin is already coming slurred. In want, you take another, the air gets deeper, you’re still awake. In the pill mind it might be easy to take several without even knowing, in the mental insistence, as a drunk does, that you are casual, you feel on par. You exist inside yourself and, in the way the walls around you go new, invite the space of dreams onto their width. Seeing sober someone pill-eating it can seem as if they are operating in altered space, unjarred: conversations with long bodies on the bookshelf, curls of color bouqueted from the TV, the room itself as several rooms.
I don’t remember dreaming while on Ambien, only that the dreaming seemed to start before I was actually asleep, played into the screwed lack of light inside the room, becoming new walls — and somewhere in there I would fall. I don’t remember entry or exit periods around the hole, the memory of dreaming and sleeping therein feeding into blurs around the waking and moving states, an infernal fabric, nowhere — except here from a temporal distance, they seem in relief — in multiple meanings of the idea, in that they milked me, gave me a room inside the well-hollowed curl of my on-thinking during a period in which I genuinely felt light-starved, but also, “an apparent projection of parts in a painting, drawing, etc., giving the appearance of the third dimension”200 in the pill’s lingering residual effect, often causing slowness, blank of nowhere, chalky ideas, slowing down. Whereas sleep would come on quicker, it would hold fakey, shallow, as if poured into me on film, and in waking also walls would feel flimsy, different, waiting to be knocked down. Waking hours between rest afforded by sleeping pills become also colored by that false shift, making the flesh itself somehow off. Harder to speak, to write, to move under that awning, with the trace elements eating the bloodstream, and the expectation of the next elapsed state waiting in the wings. Staring headlong into the computer, clicking, clicking, seeing even less, the fake light feeding its uncolor and its unheat to my flesh.
In the unfurl of days and into weeks thereafter, however, the threat of sleep newly out from under dazing pills, the recoil came in a fast wave, a sudden and immensely stacked new wall. Whereas before in no sleep I’d learned my alleys, struck somewhat in the line of daze of saddened understanding, with my mind and body’s recent foray into sleep coming to claim me, and without the easy reach of more pills, the house around me herein grew even harder. It had been only a handful of weeks, but those fingers quickly learned me to their grip. The hours of the night would squeeze and bleat me. A set of new locks on my mind. Commonly known as rebound insomnia, and in its surrounding horror of worry for its coming, rebound anxiety, this state set upon me even worse, learning my waking hours into itching over what was coming for me quicker still that evening, and thoughts of how to disrupt it, shake it off. The use of the word rebound here is particularly moving, to me, in that not only does it speak for doubling, for falling back from out of some hard plane, but the idea of being bound again seems apt — tied into a parcel to be thrown again and again against a flat and tiny, unforgiving board. What’s worse, the prior modes that’d worked to soothe me, the OTC knobs, seemed passive jokes, hardly even denting, in my new want, the thickened pools of where I walked. The inlaid terror of not sleeping now had another layer, reflexive in its bent, which therein made the insomnia itself that much more wretched, rolling. All minutes ramping up toward one unblinking, false-faced sun.
After my supply of Ambien dried up, I moved to Lunesta — sought from a friend who could get free samples, and would share. These, he promised, were different from Ambien in their pronouncement. I’d need to be lying down. I can particularly remember that first night I pushed the thin Lunesta white globe out of its skinny backing into my hand. I slid the nodule into my mouth and sat around a minute and got up and sat down in front of my computer in a mind, tried to write a seeming e-mail, a letter off into a person in my life I missed, one I’d met with the both of us inside the Ambien walls, the e-mail’s title and descending text of the mouth of synthetic sleeping coming on: i got words and together i’m trying out a new sleeping pill, half-glazed, now let’s you have them…, the words thereafter also honest and spilling from some glown gut of the new room, as it came quickly to sit around me. Unlike Ambien, there’s little trickery to Lunesta’s window — it is there and then it’s there. Also unlike Ambien, I can distinctly remember the room around me as I blabbed into her, of a mind, My brain the big suspendered burning, and you, and you, and yours, and there at the end smashed send, threw into the mouth of the computer my dissolving dream text, then fell back into my bedroom’s bed. There was the room then there was black. Upon waking, hours later, my friends in the other room would report me breathing louder than they’d ever heard me, speaking in another language, texture tongue. I also cannot, from here, remember dreaming, these hours also settled under heavy curtains of their coming, but for certain in the grip of it I had no answer. I slept on top of covers, in my clothing, in the light.
This is what we want from sleeping pills — lights out, mind out, exit. Obliterate the room. No option. Help me forget me. Under the reign of endless choices, we want none. This is the function of the medication — it delivers an intended punctuation of effect. It is to flip a switch, a removal of the I, and so therein the removal of the remembering of dream state seems distinctive, integral to this kind of sleep — as in the removal of the struggle, of the self ’s descent into self, the descent is rendered slightly other, slightly off. Sleep becomes less the state of reckoning of unconscious self in its translation, and more a coverlet, a box. Pill sleep, even when remembered, wears a ring around it, another rubber, something off inside the waking self eating the curve of what the day fights to hold onto in the leak. In one instance, in 2010 in China, a man was stopped from killing himself when he took fifty sleeping pills before going to throw himself off a roof, unable to decide between two twin ways to die. The pills knocked him out before his death drive could be completed and were not strong enough to do the job themselves, so he survived, living now with his wife inside that knowing.201 Herein the snuffing of the self provided the self ’s ultimate defense, blocking in the nothing of the nothing before the last black.
If sleep is for the self, then invented sleep is an invented version of the same, slightly askew, like digging into memory flesh you have not yet worn, or wore in other years, none of it quite yours. In one commercial for Lunesta, a neon lime-green butterfly flits around a bedroom among the glow of magic forests. As the insect hovers over the shape of a sleeping woman, a breathy, listless female voice-over monologues in monotonizing ad-speak the pleasures of our rest, and on in equally dreamy drabble begins to list its legal-bound strata of side effects, including dream-driving, dependency, contemplation of suicide, and so on. Oblivious to such threats, the butterfly flits down to tuck the woman in. The enormous neon bug then wobbles off to some other nowhere, remaindering the house in much less light. Lunesta does not portend to hide its strange presence even in waking, where its chemic chalky aftertaste resides inside the mouth — a second breath fit over the day’s breath. This chronic flavor, at first terrible and in want of masking in early users, can become, in its familiarity, a waking residue, a pleasured thing, a sublime tang.