My lifelong search for a good night’s sleep led me to a dispensary in the town next to mine. Cannabis products are legal in my state and the industry is booming. This particular store was BIG. It sold many types of weed, there was a section just for paraphernalia and it even had a fireplace with a cozy seating arrangement.
The young salesman gave me a bag full of candies called ‘Bedtime Bettys’ and I took one before going to bed. It’s a cannabis sleepaid, carefully composed of several ingredients that are supposed to make you fall into a blissful sleep. It has the active ingredient called THC, the one that gets you high.
I was lying in bed, rigid as a board, waiting for the magic bullet to hit me. Nothing happened. I mentally cursed Bedtime Betty, telling her that she shouldn’t impersonate the sleep fairy, since she didn’t deliver on her promise. I was lying there, teeth clenched, eyelids squeezed shut, neck muscles spasming, blaming my own naivete and the young salesman who had convinced me of the power of Betty over insomnia.
I tried to get back to my ordinary, outdated and inefficient technique of knitting a sweater in my head. That’s what I do to try to fall asleep. A kind of knitting meditation. It didn’t work, of course. I was a frustrated knitter, a frustrated Bedtime Betty consumer and a very frustrated insomniac.
Suddenly, without any warning, my head started to fill with all sorts of strange and wonderful images. I was floating in a sky filled with foam, like the blanket of clouds that an airplane dives into when approaching an overcast city.
Whenever I focused on one cloud, another one was begging for my attention. I was a butterfly, fluttering from one wonderful thought cloud to another. This was a strange experience. I am usually more like a moth with OCD. I circle a thought, like a moth circles a light bulb, around and around, until they burn themselves to death.
It felt wonderful to be a butterfly for a change. Some were good clouds, others were not. There were clouds that contained toxic material about dying, others that contained instructions on how to knit better mental sweaters, others yet that revealed the ‘multiverse’ theory to me on a quantum level. In plain English: I was STONED!
This went on for a while, but then Bedtime Betty decided I should focus on my body rather than my thoughts. I could feel every muscle in my face (there are about 50 of them) and the tension they carry like second nature. The frown in my forehead, the tightness in my lips, the tension in my jaws. I had complete control over them. I could make them R…E…L…A…X. My tongue started to unstick itself from my palate and fell limp on the bed of my mouth, like a pancake. It got so relaxed that it grew in size and started to push itself out of my mouth, like an inflated snake. Ok. Enough of that, I thought. This is getting too freaky.
Onto another body part. I veered toward my forehead. I was the size of a skin microbe trying to scale the deep furrows of my frown. Slowly the ridges and valleys morphed into a smooth terrain, covered with flowers. I was the navigator on my body’s ship. I was master and commander of my own physical and mental self. It was wonderful.
I moved to turn on my side, but I was tied down by a thousand ropes like Gulliver by the Lilliputans. My body was made of lead. If this is what THC does to a person lying flat in bed, what happens when you are trying to drive a car? How can thoughts be so quick and agile, unencumbered by matter and the body so resistant to change? I told Bedtime Betty I wanted to go back to my thoughts where I could leap, fly and dance around at my heart’s content and she magnanimously consented.
Once more, I was floating around in cotton wool. A cloud marked ‘husband’ approached. I knocked on the cloud, but he wasn’t home. There was a little note that said ‘gone fishing for new wife’. It wasn’t all that surprising. We had gotten into a fight that evening. A large cloud came into view with post-it notes stuck on its surface, all neatly lined up. The first one read ‘road to acceptance’.
‘Oh God, not a self-improvement cloud’ I thought. But it was one of those word clouds, guiding my brain into a superlative game. Ok, I’ll play. First you have‘rejection’, then you ‘repudiate’, after that you ‘tolerate’, then you ‘accept’and finally ‘embrace’? It sounded a lot like the Kubler-Ross theory of acceptance of death.
So deep, so intense, so visionary, so brilliant, so…
Then, I finally fell asleep.
Friday, March 4, 2022
My Bedtime Betty Adventure
