Trazodone Dreams

About five years ago, growing old, I started having trouble sleeping the night through. A daughter recommended Trazodone, which, although it doesn't help you fall asleep, helps keep you a sleep. Worked like a charm.

Except that about a year or so ago I noticed that it had started to cause vivid, intense dreams. Where you never got to get where you were going. Where no plans ever worked out, but did so in incredibly complicated ways. Still, there were times when I needed that full night's sleep.

Like Tuesday night. Sure, we now had a train that left at 7:30, but still, we were dog tired. So lights out at 9:30, a planned wakeup at 6:30, and I am way past sound asleep. Except that at 10:15 the phone rings and the guy says, You want breakfast in your room in the morning?' And I say over and over, 'No! No breakfast!' Until he finally says, 'Okay. No breakfast.'

So at 5:30 I'm having this trazadone dream where there are all these tough guys stealing all the musical equipment I've ever known, and I realize in the dream that they're taking stuff that isn't even worth anything. And I point that out to them, and they're saying, 'We're just doing to\his to you because we can'. And there is a loud knock on the door, and a guy says, 'Breakfast, sir!' And one of us opens the door and he hands us a giant pile of buttered white toast.

And I'm lying there awake in the dark, finally realizing that my life itself has become a trazodone dream.

We get on planes that decide that they can't go to Chicago. We get on a train where all the signs said it was going to Shimla and it went to Jaipur. Yesterday we were at a New Delhi park and I sat on the ground under a tree, and Maureen said, 'What if an ant bites me?' And I waved around at all the Indian families who were harmlessly sitting under trees. And so she puts her hand down so as to sit, and immediately gets viciously stung by an ant.

And it's still horribly itching 36 hours later.