Zolpi-DONE

Ever since matriculating my life has been one long line of heart breaks and chemical warfare against myself.
I guess at times it was fun but at the beginning of 2016 a little voice spoke up in my mind.
She sounded exactly like the Child Empress in Neverending Story but instead of asking me to say her name, she said:
"You are ready to wake up, now".

The Child Empress has never before been one of my "voices" so this was interesting and new and so I started keeping an eye out for
signs of what this might mean.
She might have been referring to the fact that I never truly woke up before 17:00 in the afternoon because then work would
be done and I could get my freedom on. But I knew this was a problem and didn't need a Child Empress to enlighten me to this.

Secondly she might have been trying to wake me from an actual coma in which case I would probably be an old lady in a dilapidated hospital and all my loved ones would be gone or dead or
given up on me. If this was the case the first thing I would do when I woke up is clobber the doctor who had obviously been giving me the generic drugs while I was out because much
of my time was spent having awful nightmares about screwing up my life and getting absolutely nowhere.

Thirdly, I was about to drink my last sleeping tablet that night and it was the end of the script.

I had a choice now;

1.) Go to the doctor and try and persuade him to give me another script and no I am not abusing them. Yes I am on some psych meds too. Why? Because I'm crazy that's all.
Lots of people are crazy. Everyone should be on pills. Okay?! JUST GIMME THE EFFING SCRIPT YOU BITCH!

2.) Stop taking sleeping tablets.


The second option was terrifying. I had never been a good sleeper and when I did sleep I had vivid night terrors which caused me to rocket from my bed and run screaming into the night.
Don't believe me? Ask anyone, literally anyone who had spent the night with me, before I had started taking the knock out tablets.

No there aren't that many guys that have had the privilege.
And that's not the point...Judgy Mcjudgerton, sheese.

In order to survive these awful nights of never sleeping again ever, I started working on one of my fabled plans.

Queue mission impossible theme song:

I would get home from work, cook dinner and have wine.
Then watch TV, having more wine.

Then when the clock struck 21:00 I would have a relaxing candle lit bubble bath.
This was easy because the bathroom light had been blown for months so I had to use candles and I still had bubble bath from my first kitchen tea in 2009.
The bubble bath had survived my first marriage *hang head in shame for failing at first marriage and never using bubble bath during it*.

Have more wine in romantic bath.

Maybe invite husband to join me.

Husband not interested in having romantic bath with drunken wife.

Send husband for more wine.

Husband refuses and pours last glass of wine down drain.

Freak out.

Husband feels so bad that he gets more wine.

Get into neatly made bed with fresh glass of wine.

Read a book. Not Steve King, no, we are looking for calm dreams, maybe some light Marian Keyes.

Read until eyelids start getting heavy.

Switch off light and feel extremely awake.

Ask husband to smother you with pillow, just a little.

Husband refuses.

Husband = rebel.


After executing this plan the next night because my sleepers were then depleted, I didn't sleep at all.
This sucked a lot because sleeping seems important. And fun.

The sun rose and found I had turned into an extremely hung over zombie.

Luckily it was a Friday and most people at the company where I worked operated at half speed on Fridays anyway, actually mostly because they too were hung over zombies.
What is it with a Thursday night and drinking our heads off?
Is it because it's almost Friday and we might explode from excitement because we get to do nothing but drink for two whole days?
And then wake up Friday morning never wanting to drink again?

Yeah that seems logical enough.

Back to me.
That night we had a braai with friends and I told them all about it and how terribly hung over I was *said sipping on wine*.
And they were very sympathetic and supportive *also sipping on various alcoholic drinks*.

And that night I slept, if you could call it that.
My brain had effectively blocked all memory of the dreams I had but they were incredibly horrible. Like a David Lynch movie had a child with a Japanese horror movie.
And that child turned out to be a nightmare and I gave birth to it.

This kept on going and was later joined by feelings of weirdness. That is the best way I could describe them.
I googled Zolpidem withdrawel and boom there it all was, listed neatly from top to bottom and some of them I could still look forward to.

But as with all highly unpleasant circumstances, this passed and I sort of became a normal sleeper again. Actually better than how I used to be with only the occasional leaping from bed and running yammering into the night.

My husband who had only ever spent the night next to me after I had a firm Zolpidem habit underway was in for a treat.

Now because I am always asleep when these night terrors catapult me into the dark of night, I usually don't remember what I dreamed about or where I was headed or sometimes that anything had happened at all.

But the latest one I remember clearly.

In the dream husband and I were in a garage of some kind when suddenly the garage door started closing and somehow falling sideways towards us.
Me having noticed this was frantically trying to get out from underneath it and astonished to see that husband was not bothered.
In fact he looked like he was sleeping, peacefully.

Luckily my cat immediately caught on to the fact that some catastrophic (pardon the pun) event was transpiring and speedily vacated the room in a flash of Siamese coloured fur.

My desperate clawing and sputtering finally woke my husband and he said something that stopped me dead in my tracks because of its bizarreness.

"Wat gaan aan, blaashasie?".

Translation: I can't...it Just doesn't work in English. But it involves a bunny rabbit.

Suddenly the garage door vanished and I was standing next to my nice safe bed in the middle of the night, looking down into the confused, half smiling face of my husband.
I was trying to make sense of his question when I realised my cat must have been roused by my sudden scuffling, assessed the situation as Mommy has gone Loco (again?)
and left as a result, not because of a garage door falling in slow motion towards him.

And it was funny.
It was so funny that the sound that came out of me next was a loud, unexpected guffaw of mirth.
The fact that he had called me a "blaashasie" joined in on the hilarity and saw me hysterically scream-laughing for the rest of the night.

This time when the sun came up it found a very different picture of me.

Lying in bed, gripping the covers, eyes half closed, still weakly giggling and happy as hell.

Hasta la vista, Zolpidem.