Like a pepperoni pizza, the drugs arrived at my door. The bell rang and an express-mail delivery woman handed me an oversized envelope. Inside, swaddled in bubble wrap, was the cache: scores of tiny round yellow pills, 80 in all, promising that many nights of good sleep — fewer if I got greedy.

Of course I got greedy. I figured that one and a half pills would work better than one, and for an absolute guarantee on a crucial night — well, two might be in order. Everyone I knew doubled the recommended dose of Advil for an especially bad headache. Shouldn't I do the same with Ambien for especially needed sleep?

I wasn't taking Ambien per se, but rather some promised copy of it, procured through a web site that filled "prescriptions" so long as you completed a pro forma questionnaire. The pills were exported from Pakistan, if I remember correctly, and had no telltale impression or insignia on them — nothing to identify them as anything other than, say, colored and pressed talcum powder or, for that matter, arsenic.

But I was chasing sleep, which had come to seem less a spontaneous biorhythmic segue than a button to be pharmacologically pressed, less a luxury than an entitlement. And what harm, really, could sleeping pills do? With all the Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata, and Restoril out there, these agents of REM seemed utterly unthreatening, completely innocuous. They were Tickle Me Elmos in the Valley of the Dolls.

That was two years ago, and the image of these medications has turned less warm and fuzzy since. The role of sleep aids (along with other drugs) in Heath Ledger's death was just the latest alarm; before that there were reports and studies wondering if Ambien might explain various odd behaviors and threatening outbursts. It has been blamed for sleep-driving, sleep-eating, and even sleep-fornicating. (Might one omnibus side effect be an unconscious erotic assignation with the cashier at the all-night McDonald's drive-through window? Tickle me, Elmo, indeed.)

Nonetheless, millions of Americans continue to take Ambien or its ilk, and profit-minded drug companies continue to pour millions of dollars into developing the next great narcoleptic with the next lulling name. The half-joke holds almost wholly true: Sleep is the new sex, a restorative that everyone else is having more and better of than we are and that gets harder to tumble into as we age.

Ambien came along in 1993, promising to be safer than the sleeping pills before it and lending considerable advertising muscle to that pitch. People who had shied away from such medications gave this upstart newcomer a whirl, sometimes just for long flights and jet lag — sleeping pills have become a travel-kit staple — and sometimes for much more.

Before long, almost everyone I was close to possessed (and flaunted) a prescription. My friend A. would call me at 11:50 P.M. and begin the conversation by warning, "I can only talk for 10 minutes. That's when the Ambien I just took should kick in."