DOSE:	40 mg	oral	Pharms - Zolpidem	(pill / tablet)
	1 glass	oral	Alcohol - Beer/Wine	(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

80 kg

[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]
I was prescribed 10mg Stilnox (known as Ambien in America) for insomnia. At that time, it was my first encounter with this drug and I had never heard of it before. I was trying to get some benzo's off my doctor - serepax or mogodon or even valium, but I have a history of addiction so he prescribed me the Stilnox instead. He said it was safe and not addictive. So I took the script and got the pills, but I just didn't take this drug seriously. I thought it would be like some of that herbal shit - like valerian or something. How VERY fucking wrong was I!

When I got home I took 4 of the pills (40mg) because I thought the prescribed dose of 1 pill would do nothing. Kind of like the prescribed dose of valium is usually 5 to 10mg, but I need to take 40mg to get high. I drank this with 1 glass of weak wine and went to bed. I had no other drugs in my system.

This is where it all went very wrong indeed! I closed my eyes, and in what seemed like an instant, I opened them and was somewhere else. I thought I must be still dreaming because I was in my car near the highway on-ramp, parked sideways in the middle of the road, and this tall blonde woman was by my window screaming at me: what are you doing on the road!! You shouldn't be driving!!! I remember thinking: what a weird dream. And I nodded back off again.

I opened my eyes again and I was on the Narrow's bridge, which is about 50km from my last position at the on-ramp. I was stopped, but my car's front end was mashed into the rear end of the car in front. Not major damage, but serious enough. People were surrounding my car absolutely screaming their heads off at me. And I thought: Hmmm what a weird dream. And I nodded off again. Then I woke up in a police car, a little more back to reality, looked around and said 'What the hell am I doing here?' The police were actually quite friendly and told me everything. It still felt like a dream, but I was more alert and decided to do a reality check.

Owww! I slapped myself and could feel it. HOLY SHIT!

I started to freak. The police calmed me down, and I explained to them about the sleeping pills and going to bed. The police thought I was on heroin or acid or something, cause they alcohol tested me and got an almost nill reading. So they took me to the hospital to have urine and blood tests for drugs.

Luckily, I tested negative for drugs (illicit) and negative for benzo's, morphine, and other nasty prescription drugs. Simply cause all I took was Stilnox. They didn't have a test for Stilnox, and because the drug was relatively new to Australia, it was not a drug that was illegal to use while driving. So the police couldn't charge me with anything.

Later, I heard I caused quite a little excitement for this small city. I even made it on the news. Apparently I had been driving down the highway for 50km (30 miles) going about 5km/h (3mph) in a 100km/h zone (65mph). I was driving all over the place in all 4 lanes, cars narrowly missing me. I caused a huge traffic jam (this was during a busy part of the day) and pissed a lot of people off! If I hadn't rear ended that car, I probably would have kept on going!

The next day I retrieved the car. The damage wasn't too bad. But the sides of the car was also dented and scraped. I must have been bouncing off the guard railings. About $2000 damage in total to my car, $1500 to the other car.

I have tried a 20mg Ambien dose recently, had hallucinations (pleasant) and really cool lucid dreaming.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 35287
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 27, 2006	Views: 41,893
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Pharms - Zolpidem (143), Alcohol - Beer/Wine (199) : Combinations (3), Difficult Experiences (5), Alone (16)