Night Candy that Makes Me Go Bye Bye

A review of my local drug store melatonin gummy

I don’t have a sweet tooth, which is a bit of a shame because I need more sweetness in my life. My dessert of choice after dinner is usually some kind of fruit or lemon tea with some honey in it. If I do get a cake or tart for dessert, I’ll most likely wait to eat it for breakfast the next day. Yes, I realize that saving last night’s dessert for breakfast is one of my most aggressively Chinese traits, along with repression and hating my mother.

My nightly sweet treats are the grape-flavored “Sleep Well” melatonin gummies that I buy from Mannings. Each gummy has 3 milligrams of melatonin in it, which apparently helps with falling asleep. Melatonin is a hormone that is released from the brain following the natural rhythms of waking and sleeping, and your natural production of melatonin can be depleted if you get too much light at night. I like to eat exactly one gummy before bed, even though the suggested serving size is two because I fear that I will eat the entire bottle. The grape flavor of the gummy is so, so delicious. Why do they make the melatonin taste so good? To coax me into eating more and to sleep the forever sleep?

The distinct grape flavor is reminiscent of a classic gummy candy– Not the sour ones, or the ones with any frills like pop rocks, or cultural significance like white rabbit candy. The grape flavor is the type of flavor that hijacks a synapse in the primitive part of my brain that gives me the urge to nibble like a rat who’s found a huge block of roast pork in a glue trap. Because I am an honest food critic, I will admit that texture-wise, the melatonin gummies don’t beat the Ribena Vitamin C blackcurrant pastille gummies, which have a bouncier chew in a league of their own. If I talk about the Ribena Vitamin C blackcurrant gummies any longer, I will buy three packs and eat them in one go. 

Has anyone ever seen a real blackcurrant?

I have vivid dreams even when I don’t eat melatonin. But when I do, my dreams become ten times more disturbing. I think it’s a gift to be able to remember all my dreams in detail. Susan Sontag had a cool thing to say about dreams not existing until they are told (28:34). Accompanied with my new and disturbing dreams, are bouts of restless limb syndrome, which cause an unnerving itching sensation to travel up my arms that can’t be stopped unless I wave or move my arms around. If I stop moving, the gnawing urge to move grows so large that I wish I could chop my arms off. These are not conditions where I can sleep. So, do the melatonin gummies actually give me the sleepies? Or am I eating them solely because I miss the taste of my artificial grape vineyard?

The demon I saw that night looked like a gargoyle. I was lying flat with my covers to my neck, and all I could move were my pupils, which followed my train of sight to the uppermost left corner of my ceiling. A dark shadow molded itself to the contours of the corner as if a spot of black mold had overgrown in a span of a night. I had not breathed in a long moment. The shadow morphed into something perching, like a cat ready to pounce on an unsuspecting bird. The figure stretched its long, webbed wings, and it launched itself at the girl sleeping in the bed. I awoke. Instead of a scream, all I could let out was a soft “oof” sound. The shadow dissipated as quickly as the huff of air I mustered out, but the terror remained.