Sleep Aid My Foot

I hate taking a drug to help me sleep. For me the Excedrin PMs and the Tylenol PMs are a total bust. They don’t work at all for like three whole hours and when they do they work they hold me under, against my will almost, like a bully holds some poor little kid under in a swimming pool.I do have a prescription for Trazadone but that stuff holds me under too - plus it makes my mouth feel like it’s been wet-vac’d. I have a prescription for Ambien even but I totally hate that stuff. It makes me feel like I’m having other people’s dreams and what do I want with that? I like having my own dreams during which my subconscious mind delivers to me cruel and searing truths about my own sorry self. (Example: The other night I dreamed I had a houseful of people over for some giant day-long event and there I was, car keys in hand, telling them all I had to go out on this crucial errand - and there they were looking at me with these baleful cow eyes. Even my clueless sleeping self knew there was a message in there for me all right all right.)No, sleep is like love making: it’s best begun upon with a clear head.Of course sometimes with insomnia your head is just TOO clear, like last night when I kept having thoughts about this one subject which I can’t quite recall now though the word ‘chute’ keeps coming to mind. Hmmmm. Was I having thoughts about stuffing things down a laundry chute? Could it have been about Chutes and Ladders the only board game I have ever been any good at? Maybe if I get back in the bed it will come to me but oh no wait it’s a weekday and I have all this stupid work to do never mind that trip to the darn YMCA with its zillion treadmills and ellipticals and wave machines all waiting for me to get over there and pump some blood through the  small splashing creature that lives in my chest; through that little pulsing fist that works day and night whether I’m out cold and doing dream therapy or lying awake like I was for hours last night, talking ragtime to the moon.