My husband told me that once his mother woke him up to give him some medicine. He was so tired that he fell asleep on the spoon. He woke up with cough syrup (or whatever) in his hair. He was twelve. That’s one tuckered tween.
Anybody else got a “I was so tired that…” story?
I once drove all night from Florida to New Jersey and checked in to my hotel and fell asleep, hopefully to catch a few hours of sleep before meeting my family. Then my mom called me on my cell. I couldn’t wake up and after mumbling for a sentence or two, told her that I couldn’t wake up and that I’ll call her back when I wake up.
I fell asleep talking in mid-sentence once. I kid you not. I’d just spent I think 17 hours waiting for my best friend to come out of surgery, she was finally home and asleep, so I got on the phone to my girlfriend and- Zzzzz. Gone.
I also apparently told her shortly before I conked out that “I’m so foncused [sic] I could spell it with a K”.
I very regularly start reading in bed and get to the halfway point of the first sentence and wake up in the morning with reading light still on. Granted I read laying down, but jeez, not sure why I bother!
I’m sure it wasn’t just being tired. One Saturday morning, when the kids were young, but old enough to get their own breakfasts, I had an odd experience. I was a working single mother attending college 3/4 time and I’d just had a week with very little sleep. Every cell in my body was urging me to sleep in.
Kids don’t like to be ignored, though, so there was an argument over who got to watch which television show and they had to come wake me up to play referee. I looked up and could see the dream I had been having still going on behind them. Like seeing your reflection in the glass of your windshield.
I don’t know what I said, but it satisfied them. They went back to the front room and I slipped right back into the dream. It hadn’t been interrupted for a moment.
One time I was so tired I was napping on my bed - still aware of what was going on, but too tired to do anything about it - and my cat was licking my forehead. licklicklicklick*… eventually I woke up and looked in a mirror only to find a big red spot right in the middle of my forehead where my cat had licked it raw.
I once took a road trip with a bunch of guys from college. The rental car was in my name, so I did most of the driving. After driving for something like 21 hours, we were only a few miles away from our accommodations, and I simply could not go any farther. I had to get out and let someone else drive for the last few minutes because I was so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open - it was as if my eyelids were made out of lead!. Funny thing was, as soon as I got into the passenger seat, I was fine, and I stayed awake until we got settled in (at with point we all slept for 18 hours…).
I fell asleep on the lip of my trench once - we were up waiting all night to be attacked and in my dream, it was happening. When I woke up, it was still quiet, but I wasn’t sure if I was awake yet…
One time when I was 16, I slept from 1 am to 6 pm. I woke up to the sound of my dad ordering pizza on the phone, and I looked at my clock and it said 6:00. I thought, “How can you order pizza at 6:00 in the morning?”
I fell asleep on the floor of the women’s bathroom in the philosophy building at my college. It was finals week and I’d pulled an all-nighter studying for my philosophy final. I think I’d been awake for about 27 hours straight when I thought I’d just go to the bathroom before walking home to my dorm. I got there and just couldn’t make it any further. I spread out my winter parka on the floor of a stall and seriously fell asleep there. Probably no more than 20 minutes or so, but still. Not one of my finer moments.
It was the day I got my wisdom teeth removed. I took the pain medication they had provided me, and went out to the living room where my sister was watching TV. I then proceeded to lie down on the living room floor and sleep. When I woke up, she asked why I had come out of my bedroom to fall asleep on the floor. I told her that when I was in my bedroom I wanted to go out and see her, but once I was standing on the floor, I decided it was time to go to sleep right now.
Back when I was 19, I was working at a DG. We had a real hard ass bitch* of a manager come in to take over the store. The second week she was there, we got a call that the regional manager was coming in for an inspection, and if our store wasn’t perfect, we’d be shut down and everyone fired. We had exactly a week to get the store in tip top shape.
Now, this store was a wreck. The floors were stained and nasty looking. Shelves were dusty. The stock room, which measured 15’ wide, 50’ in length, and 20’ in height was packed to the gills, except for a space 2’ wide, going from one end of the room to the other. Product was sitting haphazardly all over the store. She somehow convinced us all to bust our ass and get it knocked out.
I ended up working from 530 in the morning until 930 at night, every day for a week. 16 hours a day, every day, for a week. The only break I took in that time was long enough to pee, or go outside and get a drink from the vending machine, then back to it.
By the end of the week you would’ve thought it was a brand new store, but needless to say I was exhausted. The boss got us in a group that last day, and told us to have a seat. I don’t remember sitting down. The next thing I know, the boss is shaking my shoulder, my best friend is standing behind me holding me up, and they’re telling me to go home. Apparently I had sat down on a box and was out like a light. It took them a half hour to wake me up.
*I mean this as a compliment. She is one of the hardest working women I ever met, and there’s no one I respect more, with the possibility of my mom.
I have an eight-month-old baby. (This is an innate advantage in threads like this.) Several times lately I’ve picked her up when she wouldn’t sleep, at some ungodly hour of the morning, and stood in the dark in her room, rocking her on my shoulder to try and get her to sleep, and ended up rocking myself to sleep momentarily instead. I’m kind of scared I’ll fall asleep properly and drop her 
I always have a glass of water on my nightstand. I once woke myself up when I poured it on myself. See, I’d reached for it, and I don’t know if I took a sip and forgot to put it back, or never even got it to my mouth to begin with, but I wound up sleeping with it tucked between my arm and my side. I woke up when I tipped it over.
My daughter, at age 2, was so tuckered out that she fell asleep while eating a plate of spaghetti. One hand still trying to shovel the spaghetti in, as she drooped slooooowly down to the table. We were howling.
Then - at age 4.5 - she did the EXACT SAME THING - was even eating spaghetti. That time I had a camera handy and got snaps of the process.
My brothers live in other states, and we routinely play XBox on weekend evenings as a way to keep in touch (yeah, my wife is one lucky lady). We usually play football, golf, or combat-type games, and they routinely run until 1am or later. Once we we were playing Battlefield, and I fell asleep while moving my character. It must have only been for a minute or so, but I woke up with one of my brothers saying over the headset, “Shark, what the hell are you doing?” and my character was running in place in the corner of a room.
I fell asleep in the operating room, while standing up, while holding a retractor. You know how when you’re trying to stay awake in a boring lecture and your head starts to nod and the motion wakes you up? Turns out your knees do that if you’re standing up. Startled me enough to keep me awake until they sent me on an errand and I decided I shouldn’t scrub back in.
I don’t know exactly how old I was(between 5-7 would be my best guess), or what the events of the day had been. But I remember once falling asleep in the back seat of the car, and waking up in my bed, all tucked in, still in my ‘day clothes’. It’s the one time in my entire life I woke up somewhere having NO I dea how I got there. It was VERY disorienting.
I was once so tired when I got home from work that I opened up a bottle of beer and started drinking straight from the bottle rather than pouring it into a glass.
I guess that’s more impressive if you actually know me…
Once I fell asleep while having sex.
A few years ago, I had a bad allergic reaction to some antibiotics and took Benadryl. I was okay until it kicked in all of a sudden 30 minutes later. I had been reading on my bed with my head at the foot of the bed. The meds hit me like a ton of bricks, so hard and so fast that I vaguely remember thinking, “I don’t know if I can turn around so my head’s on the pillow.” I just barely made it and was unconscious a second later. Woke up 12 hours later (still covered in hives, ironically). I’ve never been that tired before. Even rolling over seemed like too much effort.
My brother reported a similar experience with off-label Seroquel. He had a bunk bed at the time and said that he almost fell off the ladder because he was sitting at the computer feeling fine one second and then the pills started working and he could barely get to the bed.
Widget was maybe a week or two old and I was breastfeeding her, sitting up in bed at stupid o’clock in the morning, mindbogglingly exhausted, and I realised that I could not for the life of me remember whether this baby was a boy or a girl. (We’d known since the 20-week scan, so it wasn’t like I’d just discovered this a few days earlier, and she’s our first, so it’s not like I was getting her mixed up with one of my dozen other kids.) I thought she might be a girl, but I was nowhere near sure. I considered sticking my hand into her nappy to find out, but I decided that that was way too much hassle and that I didn’t actually care.
A few weeks later we were walking home from somewhere, my husband had her in the sling and I had my hand linked in his arm, and I fell asleep walking.