To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

pain away 2 by pinprick

I found a weird story on the Internet this morning (thanks Digg) about a new sleeping pill that will supposedly promote dreaming. Since traditional sleeping pills just knock you out, users miss the REM state where dreaming occurs. This new drug interferes with a part of the brain that deals with dreaming, addiction, feeding, and God and Science know what else. This article says that lab rats on this drug indicated higher memory capacity, improve dreaming (they can tell by brain waves and muscle tone), and it suggests the drug might help with obesity, narcolepsy, and, of course, insomnia.

This scares the shit out of me.

Look, I'm all for drugs that cure or manage disease, but we're coming into an era when drugs try to improve us. I want to dream more and expand my memory capacity. I don't want to take a drug to do that. I don't want to compete against others who are taking drugs to do that.

I respect the fact that drugs help people, but I worry about what they're doing to our society. It's a slippery slope. How did Viagra go from a medicine helping men with a serious medical problem to a TV commercial starring baseball stars? How do antidepressants go from aid to those at the end of their ropes to something that helps us deal with the complexities of modern life? How do antibiotics go from something that fights off deadly disease to something we wash our hands in at the kitchen sink? And when this drug comes to market (2012 is the current estimate), how will we keep from using it to dream us out of this difficult, messy reality?

And an even better question: Where do all these chemicals go when they leave our bodies and minds?