Melatonin

I travel for my job.  I go to colleges and high schools all over the state recruiting students to come to my university.  Some weeks I'm on the road five or six days.  I like getting out of the office and meeting all kinds of new people, but there's one small, well actually rather large, problem.  I fall asleep while I'm driving.  No one can figure out why.  It only happens between about 10a.m. and 6p.m.  All other hours I'm completely fine to drive.  The other wierd thing is, if I start to nod off while I'm driving and pull over or switch drivers, I'm completely alert.  It's like when moms take their babies on car rides to get them to go to sleep.  Driving does that to me.  So, understandably, you could see where I wig out a little bit about my chosen career (even though if I really had an option at this point, I would not have chosen this as my career). 

Because my traveling season is in full swing and I've already had a couple of dozing off incidents, I visited a doctor to try to find a solution.  She told me to start taking melatonin.  Because my crazy dreams often keep me from getting a good night's rest, melatonin should help me sleep deeper.  If you aren't familiar with melatonin, it's a chemical formed in your body that helps you sleep better.  You can get melatonin over the counter at Wal-Mart or Walgreens or anywhere like that.  We crossed our fingers and hoped it would help.

The first night, I took it about 30 minutes before I went to bed.  I was so drowsy that I could barely think straight or hold a coherent conversation.  As I slept, I had a very horrible dream.  It really upset me and I immediately tried to forget the violence that unfolded in my unconscious state.  The next night I was on the road and stayed in a hotel about two hours away from home.  I took the melatonin again and had the worst dream of all time.  Let me rephrase that:  the worst NIGHTMARE of all time.  It was an unspeakable sequence of events that made me sick in the morning when the memory of it crept up on me.  I never uttered a word of it to anyone and I never, ever will.  It was disgusting and violent and malicious and disturbing.  I decided right then it was the melatonin talking.  I was swearing it off.  It wasn't helping me sleep, it was making the dreams exponentially worse. 

A couple nights later, though, I decided to give melatonin another shot.  Just one more chance.  I have taken it about five nights since then and it's working like a dream.  Or, rather, not a dream at all.  I'm falling asleep faster, sleeping more peacefully, and waking up more alert.  I'm not doing any crazy hallucinating like some meds make you do, or sleeping so deeply that normal things don't wake me up.  So, I'm pretty happy with it now.  I'm still having dreams, but they aren't scary or crazy.  They are still wierd, don't get me wrong, but not like they have been.  I'm not really remembering them anymore, either.  I can remember having dreams and maybe one small thing like where I was or who was in it.  It's definitely been great to have such peaceful sleep of late, though.  I haven't been on the road extensively since this last round with the melatonin, so I don't know how effective it is at keeping me awake during the day, but I'm really praying it does the trick.

If you have trouble getting your best night's sleep, I'd definitely recommend getting you some melatonin.  I've also heard that drinking cherry juice helps, too. Cherry juice may contain lots of melatonin.  I'm going to look into that.