Or any sleeping pill similar. What makes it different from other sleeping medications that don’t cause this?
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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.
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