At 4 am, a series of loud thumps and crashes woke me from my sound slumber. I stared at the ceiling for a moment, debating with myself if I really heard it, and if I did was it important enough to get out of bed to investigate. (Getting up that close to wake-up time pretty much guarantees that sleep time is over for me.) Deciding that indeed it was something I needed to investigate, I climbed out of bed and crept up the hall to the kitchen. Rounding the corner into the room, I saw the freezer door open. Suddenly, visions of kitty with ice cream on her chin danced in my head and I crept further into the room, dreading what I would find.
The black furry housecoat my husband wears is the exact shade of the kitty’s coat and I wasn’t reassured until I saw that it was man-shaped. I know, I know, I didn’t even think were-cat. What is wrong with me?
“Whatcha doin?”
“The icemaker is making a noise and it is driving me crazy. I am trying to get it to stop.” Did I mention my husband sleeps out in the living room on the recliner a lot? No, not because I kick him out of bed but because of his insane heartburn.
I reached into the freezer and fiddled with the thing and gave up after a mere 10 seconds. “I’ve got nuthin’.” And I turned around and went back to bed, hoping against hope that I could get another hour in before my alarm went off.
I did not get that hour and now I sit here in the living room (Hubby moved downstairs) listening to the icemaker make it’s noises (and they are normal noises, always were) and thinking about other sleepy-time adventures.
I have a history of sleepwalking. When my parents divorced when I was very young, I am told I spent the next year sleepwalking every night. I would toddle from room to room making sure everyone was where they were suppose to be. My mother told me this story and I have found that she exaggerated a lot of things but this one I believe because I still occasionally somnambulate. A few years ago, a friend was in our game room AKA back room playing some Magic: The Gathering with my husband after I had gone to bed. His wife, who I had never met before, came to the front door with a crying two-year-old on her hip and knocked. Or so I am told. I got up from bed, let her in, and led her to the back room, and went back to bed with absolutely no memory of this. The next day at a birthday party, I met this lady for, what I thought, was the first time and was laughingly told differently.
That is just one very memorable instance of sleepwalking in recent years. Luckily, I don’t seem to leave the house while I am sleeping and I don’t do it very often anymore. A much milder form of it that I do much more often is talk in my sleep.
Talk in your sleep? you ask. No doubt thinking that that is normal. I do mumble and scream and yell in my dream state on occasion but I also hold entire conversations with folks in my sleep. I uphold my end of the conversation so well that folks have no clue that I am sleeping. Suddenly wishing I had cultivated this skill for use in the classroom. My children now have a firm rule that they can’t wake me up to ask permission to do something unless they are 100% sure that I am actually awake; longer conversations, getting me out of bed, the panicked breathless state that indicates I was awoken suddenly. My husband still insists on telling me the important things while I am asleep. “Work called and I have to go out of town.” My first clue that he is gone is when I can’t find his car in the garage the next morning.
Sigh.
And then there is the sleepy-time adventure my sisters still like to tease me about. I was 17 or 18, still living at home, when I heard my mother yelling in the middle of the night. I stumbled out of bed (weirdly enough, I wasn’t sleepwalking this time though I could have been for all the action I took) and found my mother and step-father in their robes yelling at a homeless (?) drunk (?) in our living room. It seems that this guy had gotten confused and wandered into our house—the front door was locked but the back was not—and liked the look of our couch.
So here I am with a stranger in our living room, in the middle of the night. Parents yelling. Stranger slurring his words loudly in response. And what do I do? I go back to bed.
Yep. No stranger danger for me in the middle of the night. I am too tired for concern and let my parents handle it. We could all have been murdered where we stood/lay but I wasn’t going to miss a minute of sleep. I am that dedicated to my rest. <nods sagely>
How ‘bout you? What sleepy-time hi-jinx do you get up to? And furthermore, can you remember them after you wake up?
April 12th, 2011 at 8:24 am
I have only sleep-walked once that we know of. I was eleven years old living in Boise. My little brother was only five months old and my parents had gone out to a New Year’s Eve party. I slept in their bed since it was next to his crib and I could help him in the night if he needed it. Sleeping in a new bed is hard and I recall thinking about those Disney Princesses who would place their hands together and under their head to rest. I figured since I wasn’t going to sleep anyhow I’d lie that way for a while. I woke up in my own bed with my hands still clapped together and under my head in the exact same position. I came downstairs for breakfast and asked my mother how my dad had miraculously managed to get me into my own bed in the same position as when I laid down in their room. She batted her eyes in disbelief that I didn’t remember waking up when she came home, how she told me I could go to bed, how I gave her an evil glare and then walked up 13 stairs into my own room to lie down again. I checked myself for bruises. Sleep-walking is weird.
April 12th, 2011 at 6:26 pm
Oh so very weird. I love the Disney Princesses part of your story. I remember trying to sleep like that when I was younger.