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-- that being the bizzare effects of ambien on behavior and perception. I've woken up on a friend's porch in sub-freezing weather (at least I had the sense to bundle up before I left), had my apartment fill up with hallucinatory people with whom I could converse telepathically, and god knows what else. Then there's the times I'd wander out into the living room naked and dazed and stare at my roommates for a while. Almost inevitably I'd wake up to text messages and/or voice mail to the effect of "wtf were you on last night?" Sometimes it'd actually put me to sleep, if I took it when I was laying in bed with the lights already off before I finally slugged it down.
I'm certainly not the only person that gets seriously weird under the influence of the stuff. The hallucinatory, mind-bending effects wouldn't be so bad (they might even be fun) if not for the near-to-total anterograde amnesia that ambien invariably produces. Sanofi claims that the rate of "psychological reactions" is under 1%. That's hard to take seriously. I've never met anyone who takes the stuff who just falls asleep and stays asleep through the night every time they take it. Is it just my friends?
Ambien is totally unlike any other sleep medication in its effects on behavior and consciousness. What's responsible for those unusual effects is not (pubilcly) known, but it's not mediated through the same receptor as basically every other rx sleep medication on the market. Supposedly it's a "selective omega-1 [or 2 or 3, I don't remember] agonist", like benzodiazepines but more specific in its binding. Somewhere in the Sanofi archives are the results of a receptor binding assay that demonstrated activity somewhere else, if it hasn't met the shredder already. Something else is involved, and no one has taken the trouble to elucidate exactly what.
