Janet lay awake in bed. She had been unable to sleep, as usual, due to her husband's loud and incessant snoring. Recently she had become alarmed by the increasingly frequent pauses in his breathing.

Jason struggled to open his eyes as the oppressive pressure on his chest became more severe. He sensed a presence in the room and felt her weight pushing down on him as he struggled to breath. As his eyes opened slightly he saw the shadowy figure above in the dimly lit bedroom. Her presence and a vague sense of dread filled him as he realized that he could not move.

When Representative Patrick Kennedy crashed into a security barricade while driving near the capital in Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1996, he explained that he had been using Ambien, a well known sleeping medication. He said that he had taken the sleeping medication as well as another prescription for gastroenteritis. He later, falsely, believed that he had to be present for a vote in congress and began driving when the accident occurred.

Soft, drifting on air, light and beautiful...The Luna moth is now associated in everyone's mind with the sleeping medication Lunesta - the result of a brilliant marketing campaign. Who wouldn't be able to sleep, adrift on a blanket of calm, serene night air?

Lying awake, late at night, reliving the negative events of the day and dreading the morning but wishing the night was over is one of the more difficult and yet fairly common experiences of life. This is the experience of insomnia.

"I just don't understand it. According to the history given by her friend, she hasn't slept in 8 days and there have been no behavioral indications that she has slept since being admitted. We'll need to get an EEG as part of the work up. "

"Hard to believe, how long can this go on?"

"Well, 10 days without sleep and death ensues..."

One more thing to add to the long list of benefits of a good night's sleep: it may transform your mental record of the day's events into durable memory traces.

Cornelia Collins awoke to an incessant rain of blows. As she fully awakened she saw that her husband was distressed, frightened, and lashing out.