I’m not talking about talking in your sleep. Everyone does that.
I mean getting up and doing things.
They say it’s 60% genetics, though I don’t know how they can determine that. Half of my siblings and my mother do it.
If you ever sleep walk, how do you feel if you get awoken while you’re doing it? I won’t yet say how I feel–I still sleep walk about three or four times a year, and if the temperature is cool, sometimes I wake up.
Does that happen to you?
I did a couple of times in middle and high school, always around exam time. It appears that I get up and start getting ready for my day. One time, I woke up while showering and didn’t have a clue how I got there. Another time I woke up the next morning completely naked with wet hair. I’m assuming I took a shower and went back to bed. Who knows what I was wearing while walking between the bathroom and my bedroom. I would have been mortified if I was naked and my dad saw me.
The only time I remember being woken up was when I woke up in the shower. I was mostly just confused, but I figured out fairly quickly what must have happened. I was far more confused when I woke up naked though.
In a conversation with one of my older sisters just last night, I learned that I did a lot of sleepwalking as a child (before age 8 or so). I would engage my family in conversations that seemed rational at first and only after I stopped making sense would they realize I was still asleep and help me back to bed.
I have no memory of this, even though I am sure they told me about this as a child.
I do remember my younger sister sleepwalking, but apparently she was never as bad as I.
I’ve only had one instance (that I’m aware of). About a year ago, I was dreaming that I had to pee, but I was having a hell of a time finding the toilet. I mean, it was supposed to be right there, but it wasn’t. I realized that if I just stood still, I’d be able to figure out where it was, so that’s what I did. I stood there…and stood there…and then a little voice woke me up.
“Daddy?”
I was standing next to my daughter’s bed, freaking both of us right the hell out.
The next day, all I could think was how it was a damn good thing I hadn’t dreampt that I had found the toilet, and attempted to use it.
Nearly every night. I have been sleep walking and talking since I was about eleven, and I’m approaching thirty. I don’t rouse to full alertness very often because people have learned to just politely tell me to go back to bed. I don’t know how suggestible I am, but that request almost always works. When they do manage to wake me, it feels jarring for a second, but it’s very familiar to me now.
Sometimes I mumble, but usually I carry on a conversation that’s perfectly understandable - eye contact, gestures, everything. This often fools people outside of my family. The hitch is that I rarely make much sense. It’s not gibberish, but my topics never make much sense. I’ve got enough sleepwalking stories to start a “Ron-esque” thread.
While sleepwalking, I’ll often be searching for items that don’t exist. I speak very bluntly, occasionally curse, and am sometimes quick to anger. In high school (remember please this is all while sleepwalking) my parents found me in my sister’s room looking through her closet. When they asked why, I snapped at them that I needed something to wear because “I was fucking freezing!”
Before I was married to her, I spent the night at my girlfriend’s parents place and slept walked around their place inspecting clocks and knicknacks. When my girlfriend confronted me, I berated her, demanding to know “where’s your husband! I need to talk to your husband!” I managed to make her cry, but everyone had a good laugh over it in the morning.
I’ve even dozed off in the afternoon at another’s home and slept walked. I’ve “come to” outside standing in the snow, just about everything. Eating is supposedly a common sleepwalking behavior, but I’ve never done that.
I work part-time as a cab driver, and walk to work. It’s a very short four blocks, and I go in pretty early (5:30-6:00 am.) I also have this thing about being late. Not about punctuality in general, just this inner compulsion that I can’t miss certain critical times, like starting work.
A few months ago, I woke up in a frenzy that I was about to be late, threw on jeans, a fleece and some shoes, grabbed my bag and rolled out the door. About halfway there I was just waking up enough to realize I hadn’t brought my phone, but I rationalized. “I don’t want to walk back and risk getting the dogs all worked up. I’ll get my cab and my coffee and then swing by the house later to grab the phone. No problem.”
I walk into dispatch, two guys I’ve literally never seen before are chatting and looking at me like I’m crazy. Something’s not right, I know, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I’m half-awake by this time, but I see the key to my cab is checked out so I say, “I’ll just stick around until 92 [my cab #] is back in.”
The dispatcher looks at me oddly and says “Dude, what time do you think it is?” and I say it’s almost six and the morning shift’s about to start. Both guys immediately crack up and suddenly the clock on the desk registers. It’s 2:15 in the morning.
I had managed to sleepwalk to work.
I used to do it a lot as a child. One of my main activities was to overturn my carefully organized collection of plastic dinosaurs. Then in the morning when I discovered the mess I would berate my innocent little sister for messing up my toys.
I would also go downstairs late at night and talk to my parents about the mystery novels I had been reading. It took them a while to figure out that I was asleep while I was describing the novel’s plot to them. Interestingly enough, I only sleep-walked when I had read a mystery before bed. Somehow they disturbed my mind.
The only incident of sleep-walking I had as an adult occurred when I was in college in Spain and under a lot of stress from school and the pressures of living in foreign country. I dreamed that I got out of bed and went to the front door. As I turned the latch, the clicking sound woke me up and I realized that I hadn’t been dreaming at all but actually performing the actions.
When I was 5 or 6 my mother used to catch me peeing in the refrigerator in my sleep !
Ambiem, walked, cooked, drove and had conversations I dont remimber.
I had a friend once who had a history of sleep-pissing. He’d get up to use the bathroom but end up doing it in the refrigerator or all over his roommate’s record collection. (That must’ve been one very mellow roommate, 'cause my friend did it several times but lived to tell the tale!)
I sleepwalked once – a roommate called to see if she’d received any phone messages and I got up and answered, and we had a short, rather bizarre conversation. I spoke from the context of a rather surreal dream I was in the middle of that was spurred by work-related anxieties about an impending ISO inspection, so I wasn’t responsive to her questions (like, “do I have any messages?”, “what are you talking about?” and “have you been drinking?”) The whole time, I had this unsettling feeling like I had forgotten something, that something wasn’t quite right, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it…
I went right back to bed and woke in the morning without remembering this incident fully, but I had a queasy feeling about this really unsettling, embarrassing, extremely vivid dream I’d had… The next time I ran into that roommate, she mentioned that I’d been acting really strangely on the phone. :o
And no, I hadn’t been drinking. I was a teetotaler back then.
I’ve done it on occasion – I remember, when I was little, I once put my pyjamas into the toilet and pissed into the laundry basket; it was the shocked and bewildered cries from my mother than entered the bath to witness this rather bizarre scene that fully woke me.
My father, having no previous record of such things, also was missing one morning – his bed appeared slept in, but he wasn’t there, and only after my mother and I’d already spent some time looking for him (including checking whether the car was there) did he come up the stairs with a confused look on his face; turns out he’d woken up in my sisters’ old room (both my sisters, being much older than me, had already moved out by that time), with no knowledge of how he got there.
To those to whom this happens more regularly, do you get squicked out about it? I mean, you’re up, walking, talking, doing stuff, and yet it’s not really you who’s doing this – it’s like your body’s been hijacked. I don’t know, it’s a somewhat unsettling thought to me.
When I was a little kid, I was a sleepwalker (and sleep-yeller) and did a few strange things.
I woke up one morning and my pilllows were bare. I found the pillowcases in my closet. I’d apparently pulled them off and walked them across a fairly large room and deposited them in there.
When I was taking piano lessons as a kid, I must have been very focused on practicing. I do remember my piano teacher and parents harping on it constantly. I started getting up in the middle of the night, totally unaware, and walking to the piano and playing it.
My parents would hear the “music” (just random notes) and have to come and walk me back to bed. I would have no memory of it the next day. Eventually, I stopped taking lessons and my parents sold the piano. I think I was happy about it at the time. Of course, now I wish I’d kept it up!
For me, the number one feeling is: EMBARRASSMENT. I feel really stupid, even if no one has seen me. Once I went into the back yard half-undressed, thinking that I needed to protect the house from raccoons. The cold air woke me up, and the primary concern for me was to find some kind of plausible explanation for my girlfriend as to what I was doing.
Yeah, they say it’s like having a conversation with someone who’s talking about a completely different topic.
Me too. You feel like there’s something really important that you need.
My sleepwalking sometimes is a little violent, too. I was visiting my girlfriend’s cousins in Bogota and jumped up in the middle of the night and started violent kicking something in the air that wasn’t there. Then I woke up and went back to bed. I was too embarrassed to even bring up the event.
Do you mean the ambien caused you to do these things?
That’s funny, because one time they told me that I was trying to “play” the guitar–really just strum random cords.
Last week I got up to make coffee and noticed a pot of water and uncooked rice on the stove. I asked our housemate if she’d left it there, but she said of course not. Then I asked my girlfriend and she said I’d gotten up, dressed, went into the kitchen and did something. Then I just came back to bed. She asked me what I was doing and she says I said something in English that wasn’t understandable. She thought I had a fever or something.
It seems that starting something but not finishing it is common in sleepwalking. Like cooking something only partly, or just not eating it.
But it also seems that people won’t hurt themselves while sleepwalking. I’ve never left the stove on or anything like that. One of my sisters once walked along a precipice of a cliff in Mexico while she was sleeping. My wonder is: “What if I get in the car and start driving somewhere while sleep walking?”
I never slepwalked at all during my childhood, but have done so twice in the last 2 months. Once, I went into my older sister’s room, looking for a baby (I’m doing an OB rotation in school right now and see a lot of babies) and woke up in her doorway, no idea of how I’d gotten there. Three weeks later, I woke up just as I was crawling into bed with her. I have no idea what prompted *that *one (hopefully it has nothing to do with all the Supernatural fanfiction I’ve been reading lately 
).
Anyone know what would cause sleepwalking to start in adulthood? My understanding was that it was generally a childhood thing that people might outgrow, not something they grew into.
“Do you mean the ambien caused you to do these things?”
Yes, its right there in the warnings
My ex was like that. When he was sleepwalking, I was able to figure it out pretty quickly because he was being a complete dick (he was normally a very nice guy). He would usually be looking for something that didn’t make any sense (butter in the bedroom closet, “the list” for some kind of audition). He would angrily demand that I help him look. When I didn’t understand what he was talking about, he’d get mean and insulting - “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you fucking stupid?” I’d say “Go back to bed, asshole.” He’d go back to bed, and be his normal, nice self when he woke up the next morning.
Oh dear :eek:!!
A friend of ours told of the time he woke up to see one of his roommates walking into his bedroom, walk up to a chair that was sitting near the bed, and let loose into the chair. However, alcohol was involved on that occasion.
Re the OP: Only a handful of times. Once when I was a newlywed, I got up and was halfway through my shower before I looked outside (there was a window in the bathtub area) and thought “hmmm, it’s kinda dark out there”. Another time, when I was 8 or so, I apparently got up and got dressed and walked out into the kitchen, where my mother, sitting at the table, was quite puzzled.