At the outset, I would like to say that I do not take Ambien, or any other sleeping pills. My own efforts at finding herbal sleep aid have generally not gone well, for either they were totally ineffective against my insomnia, or they had nasty side effects like mild allergic itching and dehydration. Being someone whose normal interactions to various substances in life is pretty frightening, and who already has some worrisome muscle spasms under normal circumstances, the thought of adding to my difficulties in one area in order to solve them in another area does not seem to be all that effective as far as a strategy goes. As it happens, I thought of this particular title while listening to my neighbor at work tell a story about one of his “friends” who he spends a lot of time with, even going out of town to go to concerts with, despite the fact that she is dating someone else. Finding this dodgy, I do my best not to get involved.

Nevertheless, the story is somewhat interesting. This young woman, for reasons unknown to me, was prescribed Ambien by her doctor, only to find when she was looking for it that only half a tablet was left, and that someone had been taking her sleeping medications. Naturally, she suspects her roommates, who have shown some alarming habits of sleeping for fourteen hours a day, signs that they have been getting their sleep via unnatural means. The use of sleep medication is one of those tricky areas of brain chemistry, and one must be careful to do it the right way, knowing that there are many who do it wrong, and who run into trouble because of side effects or overdoses, something that has been a problem at least as long as “The House Of Mirth,” long before such cases as Heath Ledger and many others like him.

A couple of days ago, when I went to a picnic, I ended up talking to a couple of people about something called Z-Quil. Apparently it is like Ny-Quil, only there is no pretense that one is trying to get rid of a cold, but rather one is simply trying to use the syrup in the product to get to sleep. What is placebo in the original formulation is the active ingredient in the new sleep medicine. This is definitely an idea whose time has come. Whatever one’s feelings about sleep medicine, it is clear that a lot of people have problems with sleep. Whether it is sleep apnea with loud snoring and its risks of heart attack, something which has felled several members of my family, or whether it is insomnia and the temptation to self-medicate such issues that is one’s problem. In such a world a product designed specifically for sleep is something we all need to pay attention to.

For in this life matters of sleep are of great importance. We are not created to run all the time until we stop working at all, but rather we were meant to rest. That means we must pay attention not only to what we do in the time when we are meant to be busy working, but how we manage ourselves the rest of the time as well, when we are supposed to be asleep, or resting, regaining our strength so that we may rest and recuperate. I suppose if we do not rest well enough during our lives, we will have plenty of time to rest after our lives are gone, but it seems such a waste of all of our hopes and dreams merely to wait until we are dead to sleep well; if only it was an easier thing to manage on a day to day basis.