Ambien can make people hallucinate, and do a lot of things. The video above illustrates that to detail. Sometimes it can drive people to do crazy or normal things, like cooke, eat, see dragons and kittens with wings and then, remember nothing later. Now, the drug is also waking up people from nearly vegetative states following severe injuries.

There are a lot of bizarre videos on YouTube of what people do while they're high on the drug. What's really fascinating is that the counter intuitive discovery that in some cases, the drug wakes up people from seemingly vegetative states.

An article in New York Times highlights several cases of the lucidity in severe brain trauma patients after taking Ambien. The patients, of which their doctors believed would never wake up and had urged their families to "pull the plug".

A growing body of case reports suggests that the popular sleep aid can have a profound - and paradoxical - effect on patients like Chris. Rather than put them to sleep, both Ambien and its generic twin, zolpidem, appear to awaken at least some of them. The early reports were so pronounced that until recently, doctors had a hard time believing them. Only now, more than a decade after the initial discovery, are they taking a closer look.

Reports in 2003, 2007, and earlier this year tell stories of people making miraculous cognitive gains after taking Ambien.

Researchers at Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute and at the University of Pennsylvania have launched a large-scale clinical study of the drug as a treatment for consciousness disorders.


[The New York Times]