I had always been taught to sleep with the door closed for fire safety: http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/tips-fire-safety
I do, though it’s not my preference. Situations with the other occupants of the house make it my best choice, though. By which I mean furry meowing occupants. I feel that the air gets stale.
Me too. Cats do not belong in bedrooms as far as I’m concerned, and given I’m a light sleeper, even if they stayed out with the door open, I’d still hear their night noises and wake up a lot.
The only time I close my bedroom door is when it’s snowing or raining outside and my dogs are wet and I don’t want them on the bed. And, of course, I always remember to turn of the ceiling fan when the door is closed so I don’t die.
Depends on time & place.
As a young’in, I had to have all visible closet doors closed but as an adult of some age, I no longer need that.
I am much more twitchy if I do not have a weapon to hand.
I currently live alone but I frequently have house guests. Default condition of bedroom door is open. If guests are here, my bedroom door stays closed. If it is too hot to sleep without my window AC activated, the door is closed. My fiancee doesn’t care one way or the other if we are alone, and we will sometimes sleep in the loft which doesn’t have a door.
The poll is too restrictive, but my bet is that the OP knows that and thinks it is amusing to taunt others with the limited choices. Grrrr…
More often than not. My sleep schedule is all over the place, as I can’t seem to handle a full 16 hours before getting horribly sleepy. I can always count on someone else being up before me.
I did, for a while, sleep with the door open to let the dog out when other people got home, so that he wouldn’t scratch at the door and wake me up. (If I don’t let him sleep with me, he’ll just knock the door open and do it anyways. Plus, he’s warm, and I’m always cold when sleeping.) But, for some reason, it’s easier to get people to remember to open the door and let him out than it is to get them to remember to close the door when they get home. Plus, I can get back to sleep much more easily these days.
Light bothers me more than noise or heat (so long as the room’s temperature isn’t above body temp, I’m fine): door closed, blinds down.
When her kids are there it is closed because of that. The rest of the time its closed because it makes the room darker in the morning.
I was truly fortunate to have amazing guardians for my entire childhood…and they were all of the four-legged, canine variety! My mom and dad adopted a Border Collie-German Shepherd mix shortly after they got married. Her name was Maxine and by the time I came along, she was a 4-year old alpha-female who ran a tight household! She gave up on trying to herd us into one place to keep an eye on us, so she spent her days making constant rounds to check on each member of my family and didn’t rest until we were all back inside the house and stayed there!
She died when I was 8 and both of my parents stayed home from work and kept me and my sister out of school because we were all so devastated! I remember a teacher of mine making a smart-ass comment the following day when she read my mom’s note explaining my absence! Let’s just say that my mom had an impromptu parent-teacher conference with her that very afternoon…and the bitch teacher was a littlel teary-eyed (and shaking) when mom finished with her! 
A few months later, my Wolf showed up on our porch with a chain around his neck and it had grown into his neck! It was obvious that he had been abused and tortured in ways I can’t even imagine. He was terrified of adults, especially men, but I was the only one he would come near for a couple of months.
When he finally trusted me, I started trying to get him to trust my mom so we could take him to the vet. We realized that if she crawled rather than walked standing up toward him, he was much less intimidated. So we’d meet him in the front yard with his food, me walking and mom crawling…then she would be the one to feed him.
Finally, after almost four months, we got him to the vet and they had to surgically remove the chain from his neck. Way back in 1984, the vet bill was over $700!!! He had to spend two nights at the vet and I went to see him after school, then again right before the vet closed at 7pm. When we brought him home, he stayed inside for 10 days unitl he had healed enough to go outside.
From that point on, he was MY dog and I was HIS human! He wouldn’t let me out of his sight. If I went to play at my neighbor’s house, he guarded their front door untill I came out, sometimes as long as five or six hours. A creepy guy stopped on to talk to me one day, pretending to be lost and asking for directions, but in retrospect I’m certain he was a kidnapper, child molester or serial killer. He opened the door of his car and started to get out and I was standing about 10 feet away. Before he took a single step, Wolf pounced in front of me and started growling and showing his teeth to the man…he was definitely ready to kill for me!
He only lived for four years after coming into my life. I never had any idea how old he was, but I was thankful for every second of those four years that I had him as my best friend and protector!
My last two dogs have been Golden Retrievers and, as much as I’d like to think they’d protect me and my loved ones from an attacker, the most damage either of them would do is drown the intruder in their drool! And if the burglar/murderer had a ball to throw, they’d play fetch all night long jumpiing over our bloody corpses to retrieve it! Hence the gun by the nightstand…:smack:
Our door has to be open, because we have an electric fan running all the time and we don’t want to suffocate.
Actually, it’s the cat. She does not abide closed doors, and is most vocal in this matter.
Open. It totally fucks up the HVAC air flow if it’s closed. I’ll suffocate in the summer and freeze to death in the winter if I’ve got the door closed.
Also the dog seems to want to wander in and out all night.
I tried sleeping with the door closed when I had a roommate living in the basement but the temperature thing was just unbearable. He would never see in my room unless he came upstairs and made a point of looking into my room so it wasn’t a big deal for me to even sleep naked with the door open and him living here.
I’ve always slept with the bedroom door open. My bedroom was upstairs as a kid, with the parents downstairs, so I never needed to close it for “stuff”
Now I leave it open so I can hear stuff that goes on. Kids, burglars, fire alarms, anything I might need to deal with when I’m asleep.
I have cats that need to both snuggle me at night and access the litter box in the hall bathroom so the door must remain open.
I grew up with no bedroom door for years, then only a sheet. I consider myself lucky I had my own room at all.
Totally depends on the living situation (pets, boyfriends, roommates), I don’t care either way but will open or close it for practical reasons.
You know what we say: “A cat is always on the wrong side of a closed door.”
As evidenced by this thread, if you have a cat, there’s only one answer to this thread.
I used to sleep with the door open, mainly for the cats’ convenience. Now that I’m older and have problems sleeping, I’ve trained the cats (!) not to scratch at the door, at least until morning, and I usually sleep with it closed.
Every now and then, if I think I’ll want or be able to sleep in, I’ll leave it open so that they can come stare at me intently with their noses millimeters from my face, hoping I’ll wake up and feed them. Of course, now that the dog is elderly, he’s likely to pee on the carpet if someone doesn’t let him out as soon as he wakes up, so I always have to get up between 6 and 7 anyway. On weekends, I get up, let the dog out, feed him and the cats, give him his pills, and go back to bed, where I usually can’t get back to sleep and read instead.
Wow. Looking that over, if the pets were children, I’d think I needed some real help with setting boundaries. Anyway, yeah, I usually sleep with the door closed.
I’ll have to be the voice of dissent, then.
We sleep with the door closed, despite having not one, but two cats. We also have two dogs, one of whom loves nothing more than to play with the cats (an exercise in which the cats are willing participants). So we sleep with our door closed, with the dogs in our bedroom (one of them on the bed, the other in his crate). The cats have the run of the rest of the house (and parts beyond, by way of the dog flap), and we get to sleep in peace.
The only doors I ever close are closet doors, doors to the outside, and doors to the basement and attic. Most of these are to keep the cats from going where they’re not allowed. And I’ll close the bathroom doors if I’m using the toilet when we have company.