Yesterday, the actor Heath Ledger was found dead in an apartment in New York. His death was a completely surprise to me and very disturbing – not because I was any great Heath Ledger fan girl, but because of how it appears he died. He was on the floor by his bed, surrounded by pills that were scattered on the floor. The pills were a sleeping medication that I have first-hand experience with: Ambien.

    A couple years ago, after I was stalked at age 19, I had an impossible time trying to sleep. The anxiety and the nightmares had become so grotesque and horrifying that my subconscious literally kept my body from ever feeling tired. I’d be up for up to 40 hours at a time and never feel a thing. The minute even the slightest bit of grogginess, I’d get this sudden jolt of energy no matter how sluggish my mind felt.

    My doctor and I tried so many different remedies, from aromatherapy to psychological therapies to medications. Unfortunately, my body often reacts to sleeping pills in a completely opposite manner – for instance, NyQuil always made me hyper. So no matter how many drugs we tried, nothing seemed to work. Or, even if it didn’t work, I’d get weird side effects – like Lunesta. I hate that drug. For three weeks after taking one pill, I had this horrific metallic taste in my mouth that overpowered everything.

    But then there was Ambien. I thought it was heaven-sent at first, because it worked. It worked really well. I fell asleep so quickly and actually woke up feeling rested. And for a while at least, there didn’t seem to be any uncomfortable side effects. Two weeks into taking it, though, that changed.

    One night, I’d just gotten back from a Land Rover party, to launch the new LR3. It was great fun – my friend Mike and I went, we goofed off, I got to drive off-road for the first time in my life, I got offered a job, all was laughter and smiles. At one point during our day, we found a bunch of bugs on a tree, dozens of cute little beetles. I started snapping close-ups of them on leaves, on nearby flowers, all of them doing their cute little bug things.

    Later that night, as I was getting ready for bed, I took my Ambien and decided to take advantage of that 30-minute period before the drug kicked in and use that time to edit some of the bug photos I’d taken. I opened one in particular of a shiny beetle on an orange flower. I started working on it and soon enough, something incredibly strange happen that I will never forget.

    The bug started moving. Its legs were twitching, it was crawling over the petals, and then it started to do this little bug dance. Suddenly it looked less like a bug and more like a guy in a bug suit. It kept moving, it kept dancing, and all the while, I thought I was losing my mind. I was so frightened that I instantly closed the graphics program and started to get up to go to bed, thinking I’d been up so long that I was finally going nuts. But then something else caught my eye, and I couldn’t move.

    My desktop background at that point was a self-portrait I’d taken of myself a couple weeks before. I’d gotten my hair cut and the way it was styled made the curls absolutely fantastic. My hair was light, it was full, it was so perfectly curled that I had to document it. And that was my desktop background at the time. But that one night on Ambien made me look at that picture in a completely new way.

    As I was getting up from my office chair, something moved out of the corner of my eye that shouldn’t be moving. The curls were started to move, starting to dance, starting to expand all over the screen. I was transfixed, and I kept moving my face closer and closer to the screen until my eyes were only an inch away from my monitor. I was befuddled, because even though I could see the curls moving and dancing, it seemed that despite their movement, they were always in the same place. I traced the movement with my finger, and I could swear that my finger was moving, and yet it was always in the same place.

    I sat there for twenty minutes, my face so close to the monitor that my eyes were burning. I just couldn’t peel myself away from the dancing ringlets. Until suddenly, the drug kicked in, and it kicked in hard. I fell asleep right there at the desk, my head falling right onto my glass-top desk with a solid thud. I slept for an incredibly long time, but when I woke up, I still had vivid memories of the crawling bug and the dancing hair. I was worried – was I losing my mind? Did this happen to other people?

    Thank goodness for search engines. I immediately got up, went to my computer, and decided to search for “Ambien+Hallucination”. I was met with a deluge of hideous stories of all the adventures people had been forced into by relatively small doses of Ambien, a supposedly perfectly safe drug. There seemed to be countless stories about motionless things suddenly coming to life, but that was the most innocuous of Ambien trips. They got so much worse, so much darker, and so much more dangerous.

    I remember several stories from worried husbands, saying that they were startled awake for several nights in a row by their normally calm and happy wives suddenly trying to strangle their husbands in their sleep. Or loving husbands who had gotten up to go terrorize the children at night. But the worst, by far, were the stories about the people who had locked themselves in bathrooms, afraid of the monsters that their families had turned into, or who were hiding themselves for the shame of what they perceived to be happening to them.

    I distinctly remember one husband talking about how his wife had gotten up in the middle of the night and appeared as if she was sleep-walking (which she had never done before in her life.) She got up, walked to the bathroom, slammed the door, locked it, and then she started screaming at the top of her lungs. The husband ran to the door and tried to get in as he started hearing this deafening thuds from inside the bathroom. When he finally broke in, he saw that his wife was pounding her head against the marble counter, screaming about how there were hundreds of bugs pouring out of her face.

    I consider myself lucky that I only spent half an hour transfixed by dancing pictures. it could have been a million times worse. The article I read about Heath Ledger said that they think his death was a suicide. Given the presence of Ambien, I have a hard time believing that. We’ll probably never know what happened to him in the last hours of his life, but I can only begin to imagine – given my own experiences – how horrific the end of his life must have been, and how terrified he was because of the frightening and surreal images that Ambien can so easily conjure. Something needs to be done about this drug, it needs to be reevaluated, and in my opinion, it needs to be pulled completely. Even as horrific and awful as his death may have been, at least maybe it will help prevent such awful things from happening to others.