By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI, Taiwan — I call it Lippy for short, and I take 10 milligrams every night just before I hit the sack. Like a lot of aging baby-boomers, I had a heart attack a few years ago, and I’m on Lipitor now and I like it. I’ll tell you why: I have never had such wonderful, lively, colorful and vivid dreams in my life and I dream now on Lippy every night. Doctors orders.
I’ve got a stent now, too, thanks G-d, keeping the arteries unclogged, inserted via a vein in my leg by my skillful cardio guy here in Taiwan, Dr Ong. How he managed to stick that tiny little balloony thing in my heart is something I will never understand in a million years, but I
watched the whole operation on a computer monitor above my head — eyes wide open
the entire time, despite some local painkillers injected into my groin area — and it’s real.
Modern medicine rocks! Someday we’ll all live to be 500!
Me, I’m not making my Bucket List yet. I’m aiming for a 2032 A.D. heavenly departure date, but until then, it’s full speed
ahead, and I got Lippy (and Dr Ong) to thank for that.
But back to Lipitor and how it impacts the dream corridors of the brain. Ever since I started taking Lippy in 2009, I do “vivid dreaming” every night and it’s a hoot. I’m talking surround-sound technicolor dreams that are based on my daily life and very very vivid during the REM sleep periods.
And it’s not just me. Another boomer tells me: “Danny, I have been on Lipitor for about six months now, and I am having very vivid dreams as well. Every time I wake up, I am waking up out of a dream and remembering it. No bad dreams.
Justnormal dreams but very vivid and very lucid. Lipitor is the onlymedication/drug that I am taking, so this can’t be due to any other medication. I think it’s fantastic! It will be interesting to see if the effect disappears when I go off the medication. If it does, I might want to go back on.”
I expect to hear more stories in the comments section below. For now,I want to explore what this is all about, so first some facts. I’ve been in touch with the PR people at Pfizer but they are bit publicity-shy on this topic. I have no idea why. All
I want to know is what’s got into me?
While the medical jury is still out on all this, my dear Lippy is in a class of medications known as “statins”.
Statins work, a heart doctor in Taiwan tells me, by inhibiting an enzyme that results in lower levels of something called
LDL, sometimes referred to as “bad” cholesterol, and raises levels of HDL, aka “good” cholesterol.
According to the medical literature out there online, clinical trials have indicated that ”abnormal” – that is to say, “vivid
dreams” -are sometimes seen in patients taking Lipitor following heart attacks and stent procedures..However, confirmed reports of such dreaming arestill rare, occurring in less than two percent of patients studied sofar.
Only the Big Pharma companies know for sure, and they aren’t talking. Pfizer certainly aint talking to me, even though I asked them politely. I even asked one of the medical reporters at the New York Times to look into this for me, and when he heard my story, he said he would. Then, mysteriously, after he contacted Pfizer for a comment, his line went dead. He no longer
answers my emails. Are we in the land of medical twilight zones?
My dad was a doctor, a urologist and not a cardiologist, but he had one of the best bedside manners to ever come out of Avenue J in Brooklyn in the great longago, and he was the kind of doctor that made his children proud. He was the old-fashioned kind, the real McCoy, er, McBloom. He turned me into a kind of amateur medical sleuth in my later and I have
nothing but the most utmost respect for doctors and the drug companies that fund them.
When I asked a well-known writer on technology and inventtions, what he thought about my vivid dreaming
adventures on Lippy, he told me itmight be interesting to see “more public discussion of the effects of
legal and illegal drugs on dreams, as opposed to hallucinations”.
“If Lipitor causes pleasant and happy vivid dreaming because it’s astatin, perhaps some statins could be used as recreational
drugs,” theprofessor added, noting with an Isaac Asimov kind of smile: “A drug that could consistently induce good dreams on a nightly basis is the stuff that science-fiction hits are made of, If Lipitor has this potential, someone should find out what’s in it. It could change the way we……sleep!”
Imagine if someone made a legal drug with no side-effects that could induce vivid dreaming 24/7? It could change the world. Well, that’stoo tall of an order, but if nothing else, it could change the way…..we sleep.
Dr Asimov? Calling Dr Asimov!
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Bloom is the Taiwan bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World