Now I lay me down to sleep…

Roaming through my Reader this morning I came upon All Fooked Up’s post about sleep medication.  It tickled my funny bone, and reminded me of a similar incident in my own life.  I started writing it out as a comment on her post, but then decided that everyone should hear it.  ‘Cause you know, it’s NaBloPoMo and all, and who doesn’t want to hear about random meaningless adventures in my life?

I was medicated to sleep for years and years and years until I had to give it up for pregnancy and nursing.  The drug I took didn’t do crazy stuff to me, it simply allowed me to go to sleep, and then get back to sleep when I woke up four times during the night.  It also wasn’t addictive, which was awesome.  But every once in a while, my normal sleep med wouldn’t do it, and my shrink gave me something else to take for those occasions.

So one night I went out partying (which entailed intoxication via various substances because I was young and stupid and having a great time), and when I got home at some ungodly hour (or perhaps godly — don’t monks get up ridiculously early to sing matins or something?) I couldn’t get to sleep so I took one of the “special” pills. It seemed like a good idea at the time.  About 30 minutes later I looked up from the TV show I was watching to see the walls crawling.

Yeah, you heard me, the walls crawled.

There wasn’t anything special about my walls… they were the same plain off-white which is used in all apartments the world over to depress their residents.  I mean, it’s not like they were wallpapered with some cool pattern that started “moving”.  No.  The. Walls. Crawled.

OK.  Imagine that you have a wall.  Now, imagine that someone watermarked the wall in alternating chevrons, a little like this (only rotate that 90 degrees so they go up and down instead of side-to-side):

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

OK.  Now imagine those chevrons moving continuously in opposite directions from one another, and my friend, you’ve got yourself a crawling wall.  The windows were just fine.  Curtains?  Normal.  My reflection?  All good.  Walls?  Still crawling.

I sat there and stared at them, totally freaked out but also entertained.

I called many people to tell them about the crawling walls.  They told me to shut up and stop calling them at ungodly hours of the morning. My protestations that perhaps the hours *were* godly did not help the situation. Eventually I fell asleep and woke up sometime the next night (I was living alone, and it was a Saturday and no-one cared whether I was sleeping or not).

The walls weren’t crawling any more, which left me vaguely lonely somehow, back in plain off-white land.  But I was still very groggy and my heart was racing and didn’t stop until well into the next Monday.

At some later date I had to take the “special” pill again.  I waited for the walls to crawl, but no such luck — just sleep with only a tiny bit of groggy the next morning.  Apparently there had been a perfect storm of substances in my system that other night.  No more wall crawling for me.  *sigh*