Sleeplessness
Matt Seinberg

How many times have you gotten ready for bed and felt that the minute your head would hit the pillow, you'd be out like a light? Then you toss and turn for what seems like hours, trying everything to sleep, but nothing is working.

Only 20 minutes have passed.

Then you look at the clock and only 20 minutes have gone by! What happened? Your partner is blissfully snoring next to you, with their normal sleep face on. Marcy always has a "mad" face on when she's sleeping, and refuses to admit that she snores. I'm always knocking her on the shoulder saying, "Turn over, you're snoring!" She always wonders why her left shoulder always hurts.

When I was a kid, I always had trouble sleeping on Sunday nights, since I had school the next day. I put my little transistor radio under my pillow, and listened to WABC until I finally fell asleep. Chuck Leonard was a great disc jockey and he put me to sleep. I mean that only in a good way.

I remember having a dream in 7th grade when I lived in Poughkeepsie, NY about my Social Studies teacher, Miss Brodickie. With a name like that, you'd think all the boys would be having dreams about her. Without going into the sordid details, it was a very interesting dream, and over the school years, I had it a few more times, and each time it got more interesting.

Somehow, I fell asleep.

These days when I can't get to sleep after half an hour, I'll try to read or watch television, again. If I get engrossed in the book, I can be awake for two hours reading it, until I finally feel my eyes wanting to close. I'll be watching television and the next thing I know, the show is finished. Somehow, I managed to fall asleep. The television goes off and I'm off as well, I hope.

Since I like to write, I'll often close my eyes and try to imagine a new column, or a chapter of a book I want to write. Often these dreams will involve real people I've met, and some I haven't. The two recurring dreams I have both involve radio in one way or another.

I also dream in colour and stereo, as if it's really happening. When I wake up in the morning, I try to recall dream, but can’t. I once wrote a note in the middle of the night, but I couldn't read it or decipher it in the morning. It made no sense at all.

I've read that dreams is our subconscious mind acting out what it really wants to happen. If meeting Jennifer Love Hewitt is a dream, I'll keep having that one.

Is Jennifer Love Hewitt a dream?

Have you ever dreamed about something and later on you see that same scene actually happen? I have and I'll pause in what I'm doing, and think, "Hey, I dreamt about that and now it is happening." Unfortunately, it wasn't actually meeting Jennifer. It's usually something mundane that doesn't mean a whole lot.

When men are younger, they have what doctor's call "nocturnal emissions." Huh? Just call them what they really are, wet dreams. We wake up in a sweat, and feel icky down there. The last thing we want is for our parents to no anything, so we change into clean sleepwear, not realizing that since Mom does the laundry, she'll know exactly what happened. A smart mother won't say anything, except to Dad, who might want to talk about it.

The easy way to get to sleep as an adult is to take a sleeping pill, such as Ambien. I try not to take these very often. A 30-pill supply can last me six months. Normal people can finish those in 30 days or maybe 60.

I once had a prescription for Ambien CR, which is a time-release formula. It worked so well that I didn't want to get up in the morning. I felt sleepy for most of the day. I gave that one up. I went back to the regular one.

My doctor told me about Lunesta and that one it's side effects is people sleepwalking, and not remembering anything the next day. That wasn't a selling point for me, and we had a good laugh.

A few years ago, I accidentally took an Ambien instead of a Claritin, in the morning, before going to work; and I had trouble keeping my eyes open at work. Can you imagine what it was like to drive to work? I'm lucky I made it in one piece without killing myself or someone else.

Ah, to sleep, perchance to dream, of Jennifer Love Hewitt.