Or any sleeping pill similar. What makes it different from other sleeping medications that don’t cause this?
In: 19
I do not know, but I crashed my car while on it; I have no idea why I thought I should get in the car at 1am when I needed to be up the next day, and I have no memory of driving or the crash itself. When I told my psychiatrist he said that sort of thing not a side effect of Ambien so couldn’t have been the reason. LOL, I guess?
Edited to add:
This literally was the first (and last) time I took ambien, and I took exactly the dose that was prescribed by my psych…
Your brain has multiple phases of “sleep.“ It is not just a light switch that turns on and off. As you fall asleep, you drift through these phases in a cycle, as higher stages of consciousness turn off before base stages do. A form of retroactive amnesia causes you to forget the gradual drift into sleep every time, because the part of your brain that forms memories is one of the first to go.
There is a phase of light sleep where you are awake enough to move around or respond to questions, but the part of your brain responsible for forming memories is already turned off. This form of “twilight” sleep phase is actually exploited by surgeons to do surgery on things like your brain or eyes, where it’s important to make sure you’re still able to move or respond, but can’t feel or remember what’s going on.
For most people, drugs like Ambien drop them straight through this phase and into a deeper, regular sleep cycle. But for others, for reasons we don’t quite know, it may drop them into just this lighter phase of partial consciousness, where they can communicate, walk around, and even get in a car and start driving, but have no ability to reason what they’re actually doing or have any memory of ever doing so.
Once I take an ambient, I know I comment and post on here but many times I don’t remember ever writing it. I check my history and I am shocked sometimes
Took on a plane once travelling home from the US to Germany.
Next thing I know I wake up in my bed, no idea how I got there, but somehow managed to get luggage, through passport control, customs, taxi, etc. never took that shit again.
Ambien is a sedative, which limits brain activity. If you take a specific amount, it can interfere with high level brain activity while having limited impact on low level activity.
The higher levels of brain activity such as conscious activity and memory require lots of specific complex types of brain activity. So, the sedative can limit/stop high level conscious activity and memory formation.
But it might not be enough to seriously limit or stop low level activity around walking, or emotion-based actions, etc. Lower level activity is simpler in terms of neural activity and more hard wired so can still function to some extent even when sedated.
So you might get someone making a racist tweet as the emotion based part of brain is still working, whereas the high level self control and memory part of the brain are seriously impaired.
Latest Answers