Soon to be a book, then a movie, then a movie again but with a younger, hotter guy in the lead, then a book again for a while, then a Broadway musical by John Grisham.

Oh, before I begin : whatever I write tonight, I write from a mind wrapped deep in a twilit fog between sleepiness and alertness, and so it might be even less coherent than usual.

No guarantees, however.

I have been having a really hard time sleeping lately. I think it started last Friday, but I am not sure. But I had been in this state before, probably due to just how fuck up and Biosphere-like my sleep life is because of my sedentary, indoors, unnatural lifestyle, so I recognized it when I got there.

It’s very annoying, because it is so tantalizing. What happens is that I can get sleepy, lay down, relax, and get almost to sleep… but that’s it. I never quite get there. At best, I drowse. At worst, I just lay there, relaxed and ready to sleep, but it just never happens.

I picture the mythical Mister Sandman standing over me, sand in hand, going “You want some? Well you can’t have any, so there!”, and giggling.

Send me a dream already, motherfucker!

So after three or four days of never really sleeping and feeling like my consciousness was suspended in a little plastic bubble that just refused to dissolve into the sea of sleep, that I would follow the recommendation of tons of people both online and in real life, and give a melatonin pill a try.

I had only recently been disabused of the notion that melatonin was not available in Canada. I am not sure who fed me that particular erroneous factoid. It was likely someone on IRC. I wish I knew, so I could give them a virtual kick in the ass.

Anyhow, in the process of learning that melatonin was, indeed, available all over the place here in Canada, I also learned that my roomie Joe had secured himself a supply and had been using it to help get to sleep for quite a while now. That Joe, always three steps ahead of me. We think the same way, but he gets there first, because he’s not lost in Dreamland like I am most of the time.

So after many days of not quite getting to sleep, and really dreading the inevitable thunderous crash that days upon days of hyposomnia would no doubt precipitate, I decided to ask Joe if I could have one of his pills and give this stuff a try myself.

I mean, I am not so vehemently individualistic that I will ignore an avalanche of recommendations just out of what my dear friend Felicity calls “knee-jerk nonconformism”.

So I took one of these pills, which in this case was one of those under the tongue dissolving “intralnagual” type pills that are all the rage now because you don’t need water to take them.

Myself, I already take so many god damned pills that I honestly would have preferred to just swallow the thing with a gulp of water instead. I find intralingual pills mildly annoying. They are so much more of a commitment than a normal pill. You have to slip it under your tongue and wait for it to dissolve there, which it does at its own damn speed.

It did have a pleasant minty flavour, however. So there’s that. Turned all chalky at the end, though, so that kind of negated the goodness of the mint.

Anyhow, mission accomplished. Took the pill, waited to see if it worked on me. Drugs occasionally do not have the intended effect on me, so I am always skeptical.

But yup, worked great. Really, really great.

And constant readers will know what that meant : I slept all damned day, with heavy dream activity. No waking up desperately sweaty and miserable, though, so perhaps it helped me sleep more soundly or at least with more of that breathing thing.

Now, I knew this was the risk when I took the thing. Go long enough without proper sleep, and you know what is going to happen when you manage to get the cork out of the bottle.

So I knew that if it was effective, I would be getting me some serious Z’s.

As it turned out, I slept at soundly as this little guy.

That’s a dormouse, a species most of us know only from his appearance at the Mad Hatter’s table in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol.

It’s a real critter, though, a species of rodent native to the UK who spends one third of its life sleeping through the winter in a cozy underground nest it digs for itself at first frost.

Aren’t they adorable? As you can see, they, like me, are really heavy sleepers. That little fella is not going to wake up until Spring, no matter what.

Unlike me, however, when the dormouse takes his big nap, he loses a third of his body weight in his sleep, and wakes up a lot skinnier.

Boy, I wish I could do that. A hundred and twenty pounds of weight loss sounds good to me, even if I have to sleep all winter in order to do it.

What the hell, winter is boring anyhow. And in the long run, the years the weight loss would add to my life would more than compensate for the months I spent asleep.

Try the all new Coma Diet! Watch the pounds melt away on the time lapse DVD we give you once you awake from your induced coma! No willpower required because you can’t eat in your sleep! No exercise required except for the exercises our trained physical therapists will put your sleeping body through in order to stave off muscular atrophy! And of course, no effort on your part at all!

Our system works automatically, while you sleep!

The sad thing is, that sounds kinda good to me.