Jul 30 2009
Brain Candy
[Recycled material: First published in Mensa Bulletin, #479, October 2004]
I think pharmacists ought to put a little prize into every prescription they fill. Like Cracker Jacks. I bet that would lift a lot of spirits.
Rather than to drug stores, some people prefer to go to health food stores to get their pills. They find shelves stocked with everything from acidophilus to zinc, with ginseng, grape seed, and kava root in between. Many of the remedies, it seems to me, come in two strengths: regular and super placebo. Nonetheless, on a few occasions I, too, have put my faith in these pills.
A number of years ago I experienced a terrible episode of insomnia. It came on the heels of a nearly non-stop drive across the country. Once home, my mind a blur of mile-markers and my body strong out on caffeine, I couldn’t turn off the high-beams of my mind. Night after night sleep wouldn’t come.
I remember a character in a Kurt Vonnegut story who explained that flying like a super-hero is simple. All you have to do is to throw yourself at the ground, and miss. That’s how I felt about insomnia. Each evening I hurled myself at slumber—as gently as possible—and missed. And so I flew through the night, wide awake.
I finally admitted my problem to a doctor. He asked probing questions, then made some scribbles on his prescription pad. At the drugstore a woman in a lab coat handed me a starched white paper bag containing a vial of pills. The substance spelled out on the label sounded alien, more like a high-tech poison than a get-well potion.
Fortunately, the pills worked. I slept.
Yet I was bothered by the feeling that Dr. Jekyll Pharmaceuticals, through its laboratory chemicals, had staked a claim on my soul.
So I weaned myself off the prescription medication. I made the switch to an over-the-counter remedy from a health food store. No doctor interrogated me beneath bright lights. And the new pills sounded much friendlier—they contained only natural chemicals. Which must mean all the molecules had little smiley faces on them.
They, too, seemed to work.
Each night before bed I took a tablet with a swallow of water. I put out the light and closed my eyes, content, for I knew I was going to sleep. I had taken something.
One evening I clicked off the light before taking my pill. Upon remembering, I reached for it in the dark, and dropped it. Rather than risk disturbing the deep breathing of my wife, I groped blindly around the carpet. When my fingers came across what I thought was the pill, I popped it into my mouth. I slept like a cat on a pile of warm laundry.
The next morning I discovered the pill on the floor between the bed stand and the bed. What had I swallowed? Sleuthing about, I found a few cookie crumbs. Oatmeal raisin . . . my favorite. My wife had baked a batch of them earlier in the week. I vaguely remembered having eaten a couple in bed. Maybe I had fumbled across an old, dried raisin, and swallowed that.
Was I embarrassed? As a matter of fact, no. I was busy thinking. I had made a major medical breakthrough. It seems that stale raisins can help induce sleep.
For a few moments I considered developing and marketing a raisin-based sleep aid. I figured I could make it available in regular and ultra placebo strengths. The ultra would be organically-grown.
While thinking about it I wandered into the kitchen in search of cookies. I had gotten hungry. It was shortly after polishing off a third that I made yet another medical breakthrough. While spying my wife cross a hallway clad only in a towel, I realized that her cookies are a natural aphrodisiac. But that’s another story.
