Do you remember the Eddie Murphy skit about the movie Poltergeist?
Eddie Murphy: “Oh what a lovely home!”
Poltergeist voice: “GETTT OUTTTT!”
Eddie Murphy: “Too bad we can’t stay!”
This is probably similar to what has gone inside my bedroom at night for the past 25 years or so.
When I was a little kid I always fought going to sleep. Once I tell you a little bit about my nocturnal habits, you’ll probably see why… But since I fought sleep so much, once I finally did fall asleep, I was usually in a coma-like state and waking me was near impossible.
I guess where it really started was talking in my sleep. My mom would walk past my bedroom to go to bed and would hear “chattering.” The first few times she was kind of mad because she thought I had somehow managed to smuggle the cordless phone into my room and I was talking on the phone. So she’d whip open my bedroom door and I’d be laying there 100% oblivious to her and the hallway light streaming into my room… yammering away, clear as day. I would tell her nonsense things like where my in-my-dreams-only pet squirrel was going and point the little fella out to her as it “whizzed by her head”…
Then it progressed into me getting up and going to the bathroom in the night. Mom would usually be in the living room watching TV and would just assume I got up and went and did my thing and would go back to bed. But when she would go in to check on me, she would find that I was asleep and would be in the middle of disassembling the toilet paper rack in our bathroom. All while still sitting on the toilet.
Eventually when I got a little older and didn’t require bathroom supervision, I would find myself waking up in the night standing in front of my bedroom window staring out. Which was probably the creepiest it ever got for me. I even had to pull open curtains and raise the shades to accomplish this, so I apparently still had very good motor skills while unconscious! We lived out in the boonies, so who knows what I was looking at or for!
I had a friend sleep over once and she woke me up yelling at me for standing in my closet. I probably would have punched me in the face if I were her…
No matter what/where/when I have always (even still to this day) had a thing about turning my bedside lamp on in my sleep.
My nocturnal habits seemed to settle down a little bit through college and through my early 20’s. They didn’t really seem to start happening again until we bought our house that we live in now.
Pretty much right off the bat, I started in with turning the lights on in the night. Travis would wake me up in the night telling me to shut it off or by him walking over to my side of the bed and shutting it off himself.
It eventually turned into me waking up standing beside the bed, lights on, sometimes off. Then it slowly morphed into something new. I started screaming about things being in the room.
Ha! Poor Travis, if the tables would have been turned I probably would have thrown him down the stairs or locked him in the basement Evil Dead style!
We switched bedrooms (for no reason related to my night habits lol) and that seemed to make it ten times worse!
I woke up one night screaming about the pipe cleaners coming out of the ceiling. Once rubber spiders were dangling in the closet. We promptly had to hang curtains in front of the previously open closet. But then it turned into me screaming “Who’s in the closet?!” and “WHAT THE F#&% IS THAT?!?”
Sometimes I get up and follow Travis to the bathroom and just end up standing in the doorway of our bedroom or in the hallway. Which I’m sure is a lovely surprise when you open the bathroom door and see someone standing in your path in the pitch black. I’m really surprised I haven’t been shot or punched yet. In my defense I usually am just trying to go to the bathroom too.
A few months ago Travis awoke with the light on to me loudly mumbling something to him. At first (as he usually does) he thought I was awake and talking to him, so he asked “Huh?”
“Mumble mumble… How are you going to have a party… mumble mumble… WITH ALL OF THESE LAMPS ALL OVER THE PLACE!?” At this point I grabbed my bedside lamp and ripped it off the table and turned over and started shaking it over his head.
Luckily, he found this to be hilarious! (Again, I would have punched me in the face) So he immediately began cracking up. Which woke me up, and realizing what had happen, I also started cracking up. We laid there in bed at 4 am for probably ten minutes laughing so hard we both had to get up and go to the bathroom before we peed our pants!
Then there was last week when I seemed to cross that creepy line for Travis.
We have a 10 year old Boston Terrier, she currently has an ulcer on her eye. She normally sleeps in bed with us at the bottom of the bed near our feet, but Travis is notorious for kicking her in his sleep. (Yes, he’s a sleep FLAILER…) So while she is on 3 different kinds of antibiotics, pain med and anti-inflammatory meds which are hopefully putting her on the mend, Travis has been a champ and has been sleeping on the floor next to the bed so we hopefully won’t have to pay the $2,000.00+ for surgery to remove her eye after Travis kicks her in the face.
Travis was laying there, nearly asleep, long after I was sawing logs when he heard me say:
“What the hell is that in here?”
I think he knew I was asleep because he didn’t respond.
“Well.. WHATEVER it is, I just pray to God it doesn’t start moving under the bed…”
At which point the hair on the back of his neck stood up as he glanced beside him into the darkness, which of course happened to be under the bed.
Luckily nothing ate him or dragged him under there… but he definitely told me about it with a slightly disturbed tone in his voice.
I’m not sure what the deal is with my night time activities. And as a friend pointed out the other day, it is totally weird that it’s different in different places. Like how it seems to be the worst in our spare bedroom. I mean it’s not like my head spins around and I spit green pea soup all over the place, but it would probably be pretty disturbing.
Anybody have any sleep walking/talking stories?
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