All your concerned comments regarding Ambien alarmed my wife and I to do a trial run last night, and all is well. No weird side-effects, I felt fine in the morning. in fact, it didn’t seem very strong at all — certainly didn’t have more effect on me than your average tylenol PM usually does.

demon drug? really?

On Sunday I was on a plane from Chicago to Seattle, and the lady sitting next to me was asleep… until suddenly she started laughing. She had dreamed something so funny that her own laughing woke her up. (She didn’t tell me what her dream was, but she was anxious to let me know she wasn’t laughing at me.)

That has happened to me a couple of times. The first, and most vivid, dream I had was when I dreamed a musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (This was during season 4 or so, so there weren’t even rumors of the season 6 musical ep yet.) I remember that I dreamed the music and the rhyming lyrics, but what woke me up was when the giant singing spiders started tap-dancing. That made me laugh so hard I woke myself up, and I was giggly the whole day.

I also woke up one night wearing only a t-shirt and one sock, in the snow, trying to unlock my car door with a fork. I told my wife I had to save “Julie” so that we could get married. My wife’s name is Kris and I swear, to this day, I don’t know who “Julie” is or was.

One more thing- try NyQuil. One shot right before they serve the first meal on the flight and you are good to go until you are about 3-4 hours out of SYD.

I got my mom interested in playing video games as a way of blowing off steam after a hard day at work, usually a first-person shooter (Quake 2) or fantasy hack-and-slash (Diablo 2). The game isn’t as important as the fact that she often asked me for advice in certain situations, as I frittered away many more hours unraveling the intricacies of the game design.

There were a couple times that she woke me up and asked me how to do things, defeat bosses, and I responded thoughtfully and lucidly. She would tell me “Thanks for helping me with that” later and I didn’t remember any of it.

Now, though, I live on my own and sleep regular hours, so I don’t have… somnologorrhea? Or anyone to tell me about it, at least.

The same sister used to sit up and talk to me occassionally when I would come home late and enter our shared bedroom. Her eyes would be open and it wasn’t until she said something totally non-apropos that I would realize she’s asleep. For instance I might ask “when did you get home?” and she might reply “put peanut butter on my toast”.

It was seriously creepy.

Student training leaders would constantly call out commands in the middle of the night. You’d be standing in the dark, desperately trying not to fall asleep, and some one would call out a ‘Forward March!’

Maniacal laughter. I eventually found the girl who was doing this. She never remembered her dreams later on, but apparently was having a good all time.

I slept by the back door. During midnight checks, the Training Instructors would come in through that door rather than the front convinced it would be quieter- Until I woke up and threw my running shoe at one. I don’t know why, but I remember being very very upset the TI was letting the ants in. there were no ants and I didn’t get much sleep after that.

One girl would ‘call’ her mom in her sleep, and another was caught trying to clean the mirrors with soap.

Good times….