Trouble sleeping...

have you tried working out regularly during "normal" hours? i find that helps

Try Tylenol PM.

Do you have something on your mind?

When I was going through a breakup last summer, I had so much trouble sleeping that I actually began to dread going to bed at night, and when I finally did get to sleep, I'd often have horrible nightmares about being in the Vietnam War. I ended up getting two to three hours of sleep a night at best, until about a month later when I went to a party where I became reacquainted with an old friend, got laid, and got trashed (I rarely drink). From there, I began to sleep much better.

Maybe you need to get the lead out?

Melatonin with some valerian root. You'll thank me later.

the weird dreams you have indicate that you have a problem with stress. you get an impression of the beginning of the sleep paralysis. that´s when your brain get´s kind of disconnected from the spinal, to prevent injuries which could happen if you moved the same way you do in your imagination while in a dream phase.
what most people haven´t understood yet, this disconnection works both ways. you can´t move your body, but you don´t get any perception from your body as well.
so while your stem brain is giving the commands for breathing while in a dream phase, your cerebrum doesn´t know that you are in fact breathing. as your brain is having kind of an amnesia during the sleep cycles, you don´t know where you are at the beginning of a dream phase.
so you don´t know where you are, it´s dark, you don´t feel your body and you can´t breath.
this makes you dream you´re drowning.

I can only hope you don´t take any medication. because this will only make it worse once you stop taking them. trick cyclists, medics and sleep scientists are far away from a healthy understanding how the human brain and it´s sleep works.
don´t take anything, believe me. try some sports in the morning, not in the evening or you will have more problems sleeping. meet friends, talk about your problems or about your emotions. if you can´t sleep your brain is working to find a solution which is bigger than common problems. to reduce the effects of the weird dreams, you could try some lucid dreaming, preferable the "WILD" technique. this way you will understand the phenomena of sleep paralysis.
medication will suppress the solution finding process ..

Any Wal-Mart, CVS, Rite-Aid, Public, etc pharmacy. The melatonin puts your body to sleep, and the valerian root relaxes your mind. It also makes you have some extremely vivid dreams, so have fun!

I was also going to suggest looking into Valerian root. I've never tried it myself, but I've heard positive things. For anyone that has taken it, are you taking capsules or are you taking the actual root (in a tea perhaps)?

Exercise and/or masturbate.

Melatonin+valerian root cocktail (1+1). The jury is still out on whether those are habit forming, or not. Even if they are, def not in the same category, as prescription sleep pills

+1 on the melatonin. I take some every sunday since its so hard to fall asleep after a long drinking weekend. It just relaxed you and lets you fall asleep, not knock you out.

Never heard of the valerium or whatever. I take a supplement called ZMA (just a mix of Zinc, Magnesium and Vitamin A), and that gives you some pretty vivd dreams. You wake up and actually feel like youve been in another world. Makes sleep fun.

check this site out for products. use at your own risk though, i can only safely recommend the 2 I listed. You can get 100 melatonin tabs here for $1.89. That is almost 2 pennies per night: http://www.bodybuilding.com/store/slp.htm

I sincerely don't mean to pick a fight here, but this is awful "advice." If you're an insomniac there is no reason not to consider medication. Avoiding sleep meds when you're an insomniac is like avoiding antibiotics when you have an ear infection. These are treatable illnesses.

Quite contrary to the above, Ambien (and other sleep meds) can be quite helpful. It's great for getting back into a more reliable, fixed schedule. If you use it as your doctor directs the insomnia doesn't get worse when you quit. They'd probably give it to you for about a week and tell you to keep to a regular bed time. The idea is that it can correct your schedule by knocking you out at the same time every night. There is a possibility of one night of a bit of rebound insomnia, but even if that happens it's not terrible and it passes quickly. Yes, if you abuse it you'll probably have a problem, but if you follow the doctor's orders you will be fine.

I know you said you were hoping to avoid a doctor, but if nothing else works it might be worth trying. They produce a generic now, so it's not quite as expensive as it used to be, even without insurance.

Valerian root is a ground up root taken in a powder-in-a-capsule form. Melatonin is a tablet. I haven't heard anything of either being habit-forming, and I look for academic journals on this stuff.

I take 1 mg of each a night. Take more of the valerian root for a good time. I love my zombie/apocolyptic world dreams. Life's exciting, why shouldn't dreaming?