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Comment by neurobashing | Hacker News Reader

I've been using something called Intermezzo, which is basically 'baby Ambien'. It's a crazy mild dose, sublingual so you don't need to even get up and swallow a pill. Knocks you out for maybe 4 hours on a good day. The idea is to knock you out just enough to get you into a sleeping habit on your own, not sedate you into oblivion.

It works OK, I guess, but every now and then I power through it and end up having not so much a trip as ... something like lucid dreams written by a bored, disinterested TV script writer.

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It actually is literally Ambien, or at least the identical active ingredient, just at a lower dose. Also taking it sublingually gives it a more rapid onset of action.

Ambien never did much for me, but I'd be curious if the sublingual delivery worked better.

I love zolpidem too much, that's why I don't use it.

The best functional case for zolpidem/ambien that I've found is to first fall asleep with melatonin, and if I waked up before 4 AM, I'd take 5mg of zolpidem and be back to sleep in 30 minutes.

However, if I take 10mg of zolpidem and don't immediately go to sleep, I start hallucinating and I quite like it: first colors go away and the fonts seem to lose texture/wash out, then the sweetest audio hallucinations start that narrate what I'm reading, embellish the story or just thin, otherworldly voices that talk to themselves.

Same here, I just never go to the 10 mg dose. I ration zolpidem as much as I can - only got to tolerance (for the 5 mg dose) after over 2 years of sparing use.

As long as you use melatonin sublingually it should do the same thing right down to the 4hr nap, only .3-1mg is needed.

> only .3-1mg is needed

It's a bit more subtle than that: the correct dose is about 300 to 1000 micrograms. Doses significantly larger than that will not work for most people. The effective dosing window for melatonin is narrow, so more is not better.

It doesn't help that most melatonin available OTC in the US is in doses of 3mg to 10mg. This stuff is not useful. You need the 300 microgram pills, the 1 milligram pills, the liquid, or as a last resort the 3mg pills with a splitter.

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