Viibryd Nightmares!

The Devil exists and he comes in little, easy-to-swallow tablets.

Nothing warms up a potential audience quite like talking about comic books AND mood disorders, I always say. Next I’ll be talking about my collection of Vegeta corn cob holders and how much of a “nice guy” I am to all the ladies.

For whatever reason, though, against my better judgment and my insistence that I avoid writing too much about my personal life, I feel compelled to talk about my current adventures with vilazodone, code-named Viibryd. During my struggles of coping with depression, major crippling anxiety, and motivation to do all the shit I gotta do on a daily basis, it happens to be the EIGHTH psychotropic medication I’m trying since I started down this particular path over a year ago. Oh, there have been many fun twists and turns along the way! I don’t even want to list the other seven medications, because even if I could remember half the 24 letters involved per drug name, there’s nothing I can even really write home about with any of them at the end of the day. “Oh wow, Wellbutrin made me wake up in a two-inch-deep puddle of sweat every night at 3am, forcing me to swim to the bathroom to get a drink of water and struggle out of my sopping wet, swamp-ass t-shirt”. Yawn.

Viibryd’s been great, though. Viibryd helped me survive the Christmas season by allowing me to float through dinner in a complete foggy haze while I focused on how cool Rimfrost’s music sounded in my woodsy suburban Michigan childhood home! Viibryd made it possible for me to bake a cinnamon apple and pear crisp two weekends in a row (and then made it possible for me to subsequently eat more than 2/3 of each crisp in a span of three days apiece, resulting in a noticeably increasing plumpness which started drawing the mockery of the neighborhood children while I shovel the snow in my crop top).

Viibryd hasn’t been peachy with respect to the strange sleep-related side effects. It took me a while to figure out that it was the medication’s fault in the first place, since I initially chalked it up to heightening social anxiety during the tense holiday season. Take the medicine without food? BAM! Increased heart rate at bedtime. Take the medicine a couple hours off schedule? BOOM! Restless 3am tossing and turning in sweat-soaked haze. Accidentally miss a dose? KAPOW! Psychotic locked-in half-aware dreams about committing felonies and going to below-ground shopping mall prisons! Here are three of my more eventful episodes:

Viibryd Nightmare #1!

I mean, it wasn’t exactly like this, but the vibes are right.

I had this pleasant little night terror about one week after starting the medication while staying at my parents’ house during Christmas. Before sleep even occurred, the sensation of intermittent synapses firing across my eyeballs kept me groggily alarmed, a sensation that I would soon learn to be the telltale sign of a shitty night ahead! Again, I felt overstimulated from the day and I reasoned it to be extra adrenaline buzzing through my stupid brain.

This soon morphed into a strange, half-asleep state where I could feel myself lying in the bed while my mind felt like it was being rocked in a ship. Soon, I felt like I was floating across the bedroom near the floor, trudging through a bog of swirling darkness and eerie disembodied voices. I could feel myself attempt to move my arms, but they wouldn’t budge. My mind reached the door of the bedroom before another firing synapse sent me bolting upright in my bed! Merry Christmas!

Viibryd Nightmare #2!

Don’t try to change me, ghosts! I’m a strong, independent black woman who don’t need no man.

Having successfully navigated through the first nightmare evening, I continued my Christmas vacation undisturbed by another similar incident. Must’ve been an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato! There was more gravy than grave about it, whatever it was! I let my guard down and wrote off the first night as a total fluke.

Nightmare #2 didn’t occur until the night of February 6th, which I remember distinctly because I was trying to listen to the new Black Country, New Road album! Synapses fired again, which put me in a rather salty mood as I tried to enjoy the dizzying highs of “Chaos Space Marine” unfettered by pesky moments of psychosis! Eventually, I called it quits on trying to enjoy the record and settled in to sleep.

Repeatedly, at around 12:30am, I was hearing a big SQUISH that would only fall silent every time I lifted my head to look at the clock. Once my head was back on the pillow, it was SQUISH SQUISH SQUISH. Like squeezing a wet sponge. I tried shifting positions, I tried keeping my head up for about a minute, I tried everything except actually leaving the bed…because I couldn’t. It felt like some force was keeping me there. I started to realize that I was dreaming, but that didn’t help. SQUISH SQUISH SQUISH. My dream-self was convinced that this dream-sponge was dream-squishing a message to me, but I never did figure out what it was supposed to be. I also never figured out why it stopped when I looked at the clock. Were the clock and the dream-sponge enemies? Was the clock the predator, the dream-sponge the prey, and my focus on the clock was the means to give away its position, setting it up to be pounced upon and picked apart savagely by the nimble hands of the clock? To this day I do not know! Perhaps more Viibryd-induced dream disturbances will unlock more pieces of this puzzle, but I am far from ready to continue this particular adventure.

Viibryd Nightmare #3!

It’s like that movie where Tom Hanks couldn’t pee without crying.

This one was the bad shit. This was the one that convinced me to reconsider my medication decisions. The hallucinations and physiological effects were so disruptive on the evening of February 10th that I had to take the day off from work the next morning and continue sleeping for seven more hours, until about 1:30pm. Even at that time I wasn’t rested, and I didn’t feel like myself again until the NEXT morning. I felt like I was losing my mind. I felt like I was developing a serious psychological disorder. I even turned to the Internet to seek similar anecdotal evidence, and I was relieved to find it!

I mentioned this one earlier, the shopping mall prison nightmare. The dream involved being in a building that reminded me of a ’90s-era video game overworld area. Like in Super Mario 64 or Diddy Kong Racing or any of the PS1 Spyro games where you can run around looking for portals to the levels. It was also like a shopping mall, but it was also like a trailer park! It was very strange.

Eventually, like the previous nightmare, I became aware that I was dreaming. In this particular instance, I was presented with an opportunity to show my little dream social circle that I could prove that I was dreaming! So what did I do? I murdered one of them!

Nothing major. I think I just bopped one on the head Mario-style. Well, the rest didn’t take kindly to my blasé act of homicide and, without any perceived lapse of dream time to speak of, the Dream Police arrived to the scene!

Next thing I know, I’m trapped in the basement of the building. It looked like a sad shopping mall with vacant store fronts and dirty floor tiles. From this point forward the dream lasted forever. I tried to will myself awake as I wandered the endless, lonely, unkept hallways, but it wasn’t working. The dream kept dragging on and on, stretching to what seemed like hours. In reality, it’s possible that only mere minutes were actually passing. The dream took long enough that I started thinking, with my dream-mind, that I was either stuck forever in this hellhole, or that I was literally developing a serious mental disorder.

Then I woke up! And I was groggy! And then I stumbled and grumbled my way through seeing the rest of my family off to work/school and I went the fuck back to bed.

Do I Recommend Viibryd??

Absolutely, man, it’s a real trip having strange fever dreams if you miss a dose by six minutes! If you have even a shred of anxiety that you’re looking to alleviate, Viibryd is perfect to show you how limitless a person’s capacity for feelings of dread can really be! 5 stars.