According to several husbands, parents, and sibs, (all of whom may be lying) I walk and talk in my sleep. I have awakened in odd places, once, naked, I was startled awake by grabbing a very cold doornob, the one to outside in the snow!
Another time I awakened standinf on my pillow, looking out a non-existent window, into a nearly non-existent backyard, ( 4 feet by 6 feet) asking my confused mate when the garbage truck would be finished backing out of the yard.
When I was pregnant I would drive my husband mad with this sort:
Me:"(tehe tehe giggle giggle) "
Him: “Honey? Are you okay?”
Me: (seriously), Yes, I’m fine. (giggle giggle giggle)"
Him: “Are you awake?”
Me: “Yeesss, Why?”…"(tehe)"
Him: “you’re laughing.”
Me: “No I’m not!..(giggle giggle)”
Him: “Honey, wake up.”
Me: …
Him: “So, are you awake?”
Me: “(Giggle, giggle, GIGGLE) GIGGLE GIGGLE!”
Him:" Please wake up, You’re laughing"
Me: “No, I am NOT laughing, you’re dreaming…(giggle giggle)”
Him: “I give up!”
He get up, turns on the bathroom light.
I sit up rubbing my eyes, asking why my sides hurt, and why I feel like I could pee my pants.
It happened at least 4 times while I was pregnant. No other time in my life.
About 6-7 years ago, when I was living with my then girlfriend, I woke up in the middle of a dream, absolutely convinced that the Russians had invaded. Also, stopping this invasion and saving Sweden was somehow up to me and one particular video cassette that I had to locate immediately, in a pile of video cassettes on the floor by the bed.
My girlfriend wakes up to the terrible noise of me rummaging around in the pile, throwing tapes this way and that, desperately trying to find the one I need. She tries to get me to stop and I angrily yell at her. Doesn’t she understand? The Russians are invading! I have to stop them! I need that tape!
Even more bizarre, after a couple of minutes of this I realize that I’ve been dreaming and that the Russians are not, in fact, invading, but then I decide that I have to cover up this fact by lying. I keep claiming that the Russians are invading and I need that bloody tape for a few more minutes, until I slowly realize that the illusion that Sweden is at war with Russia is going to be damn difficult to uphold all on my lonesome. I finally go back to sleep.
I’m not usually a sleeptalker, but I did have one (witnessed) bout of it. A little background info is required:
I was sleeping over at a friend’s house. Said friend is a lesbian (I am a straight female). She had liked me for a while, but respected the fact that I was straight – we did, however, joke around a lot. We had a mutual female friend named Samantha.
My little sister used to be a chronic sleepwalker/talker. She would get up in the middle of the night to pee, walk to the kitchen, and either open up one of the cabinets or the refrigerator and try to get in them to pee. I seriously think that if we hadn’t woken her up in time, we may have found puddles in our cabinets.
When she was about six, she wandered downstairs where my folks were having a little cocktail party, wordlessly climbed up onto the arm of a big old chair, lifted up her nightdress, and let fly. My mum was horrified and said “Peggy-sue! What are you doing?” The sweet little reply: “I’m peeing over the side of the boat, mummy.” (We spent a lot of time on the lake, and this was a regular procedure. Heh heh.)
When my older boy was a fairly new baby I had a dream in which I thought some disaster was happening (maybe an earthquake, I’m not sure) and I grabbed my husband and yelled that we had to get out.
He told me there was nothing wrong, so giving up on him, I went to grab the baby and run. He didn’t want the baby shocked awake so he grabbed me and tried to restrain me.
He was stopping me saving my baby from certain death, so I punched him as hard as I could in the face, decked him and grabbed up the baby to run.
My husband had got up from where I had punched him over and realised that he had to get the light on to wake me up (I had frequent night terrors and he had learned to get a light on). In his panic he grabbed the hanging cord and yanked as hard as he could, bringing down the entire light fitting.
It ended with the three of us all standing in the wreckage of the bedroom, crying with shock and fear. Horrible.
Oddly enough since that time, I have never had another night terror in the past 8 years.
They are truly terrifying - you wake up, usually in the first half of the night, out of a dreamless sleep (normal nightmares tend to happen towards the end of your sleep) and in a parallel universe. Before I had kids I used to wake up absolutely and utterly and see an enormous spider next to me or in the doorway. They would be bigger than a cat! And really, really there. Urk.
I used to also have nameless ones that would make me scream my head off.
One hot June night just after we moved into a new neighbourhood I had a screaming one, and woke husband up. We didn’t put the light on, but knelt at the window and watched the lights in the flats around go on. About 10 minutes later a police patrol car came round the flats with its lights flashing, parked a few minutes and then drove away.Oooops.
When I was at university I had one that was so bad that I really thought I might die if my heart didn’t stop beating like that. That one really shook me and I felt weak and depressed for days after it. Usually they don’t have much impact on my daily life.
I have also ended up on a fourth floor balcony, running from a spider which was trapping me in the bedroom so I climbed out the window. And I have also grabbed the baby and run out onto the same balcony before the really bad one. VERY scary.
My older son inherited them, so about every couple of months, we have to follow him round the house as he screams and wails. The wailing is horrific, like he is in the deepest spiritual pain…There is nothing you can do for the victim because if you approach them, you become part of their horror - like Mummy turning into a dinosaur or something (not sure what he sees, he is never coherent enough to tell us.) We follow him without touching him, (because if you do, he fights, claws and screams to get you off!) singing songs, reassuring him (which is ignored - not sure if it gets through but it helps us!) putting on lights and fending him off dangerous stuff till he calms down enough to lead back to bed, where he will go on sleeping unaware that he was ever dreaming, and we will sit there with beating hearts and feeling thoroughly creeped out. He has never shown any sign of tiredness or other disturbance the following morning!
Bad manners posting twice in a row, but I remembered a funny one from my high school days.
I lived in the deepest country where there was no high school, so I stayed with a family in the big town during term times as a lodger. There were two of us staying there and the family had two kids of similar ages, too.
One summer morning I woke up really early, about 4am, and couldn’t get back to sleep for worrying about exams, so decided I might as well get up and get on with the day. I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea when the son came wordlessly into the kitchen, unlocked the back door and started to go out.
“Alan, what are you doing??” I asked.
“Going to college, what do you think?” he snapped.
“But it’s four in the morning and you are wearing nothing but underpants and a leather jacket. Go back to bed.”
He just looked down at himself, went “Uhhh” and ambled back off upstairs. When the rest of the family came down for breakfast I gleefully primed them, and it was a great moment when he staggered down, nearly-late as always, with a look of puzzlement on his face, saying to the six of us grinning at him,
“I woke up in my jacket this morning and I can’t think why…”
Sort of a night terror (I call them waking dreams, but then again, I’ve never had one where I’m completely terrorized, except for this) - When I first got married, we had just gone to bed and about ten minutes later, I’m aware of a shape on the floor next to my side of the bed. Looking over, I can see it’s a bobcat!
It leaps over me and onto my sleeping bride who, needless to say, I defend zealously.
Of course, all she knew was that she was woken up being wrestled with by her idiot husband, who is shouting, “Get off her, damn you!”
When order had been restored, I looked over the side of the bed again, just to make sure, and there was a small rug on the floor, slightly crumpled. It’s shape, to my beta-waved brain, must have suggested the large cat.
That’s interesting; I had recurring nightmares about giant spiders when I was a kid. These were more like Volkswagen-size, though. I used to see things at night, too. I remember I saw a dinosaur, and maybe a tiger once. After a while they became more benign - once I woke up to find a line of mice walking across my chest. I reached out and picked a couple up; they just kept walking and jumped off my hand to rejoin their fellows. I always knew that what I was seeing wasn’t real, though, and after a while I outgrew them. I kinda miss them.
I once woke up to see what looked for all the world like a decapitated head lying on my bed. I was probably nine or ten, and had recently given myself the heebie-geebies by reading one of those Scary Stories books. I was absolutely terrified, but I finally forced myself to reach out and touch it. Turned out it was only one of my stuffed animals. Whew.
I have vivid dreams related to movies that I have seen recently. About a week after watching the extended cut of Das Boot I commanded a torpedo run against an enemy convoy (complete with a retaliatory depth-chargeing by a destroyer). I was thrashing around in my sleep yelling “Rig for depth-charge!!!” and a whole lot of other nautical jargon.
My dream about Starship Troopers was, apparently, comedy gold.
My little brother is a very sound sleeper, and when he was about 6 or 7 he would half-wake himself up needing to pee, but couldn’t achieve the level of consciousness necessary to navigate to the bathroom.
… so he’d come into my room, shake me awake, and yell, “Let’s Go!” and try to pee in my laundry hamper.
One incident I remember clearly, though:
Tommy came downstairs after being in bed for a few hours. Dad, thinking that Tom probably needs to pee, pushes Tom into the bathroom, lifts the lid, and says, “here you go.”
My parents and I then go back to the living room and talk for about 15 minutes. Suddenly, we remember Tommy.
We go back into the bathroom to check on Tommy.
Tommy is kneeling by the toilet and crying, really crying. Snot-bubbles are forming colonies on his chin.
Dad: What is wrong, Tom?
Tommy: I’m so sorry, Dad sob! I know you want me to, but I just can’t throw up sob**sniffle!
Wha?
I was a frequent sleepwalker/talker when I was a kid. Mr. Kat tells me that I sometimes mumble and thrash around, but nothing coherent.
The story that gets told the most happened when I was about 7. I walked into my parents’ room and kind of hovered over my mom til she woke up. The I dramatically declaimed, “By the time this election is over, I’ll be long gone.”
I wonder if my dog does this. He does strange things when he’s sleeping. Occasionally he’ll wake up and make a long, gut-wrenching-sad howl… and then go right back to sleep.
Apparently I sleep talk, and I know I have a few stories, but I can’t remember them.
In a related note, I was once practicing my punches while training with Shaolin monks in the mountains. When my friend, who was sleeping over, tried to wake me from this dream, I let out a guttural “HA!” and delivered a left jab to his bits & pieces. :smack:
I’ve also been known to fly in my dreams by jumping. Except in reality, I’m just kicking the bed and anyone in it. :smack:
My older brother would have night terrors when we were kids. He would wake up screaming. Really shrieking at the top of his lungs, a sustained, high-pitched, full-throated howl like someone whose mind was completely blown with horror. It was just appalling.
And one night he woke this way and lunged into my bedroom screeching and howling and leapt on top of me. Meanwhile he awakes to find me furiously struggling with him so he starts trying to restrain me, which freaks me out even more, and it sounds like he’s yelling I’m gonna get you! I’m gonna get you! over and over until my parents came and broke it up.
The funny thing was, perhaps thankfully, he had no memory of whatever nightmare he’d been having, once he woke up.
Hmm. Perhaps that’s not so much pillow talk, but it’s definitely Twilight Zone!
I had a dog that did some weird things while she was asleep, too. She’d start kicking her legs like she was running, and sometimes let out a muffled bark or a growl. It was hilarious! Sometimes if she got too carried away I’d try to wake her gently. She’d open her eyes and look at me like, “WTF”?
These getting-up-to-pee stories reminded me of my sister, who is a sleepwalker (I’m a talker, she’s a walker. Our poor mother had her hands full.) Anyhow. One night when Sis was about six, and I was about 11, Mom and I were up late watching a TV movie when Sis came into the living room from our shared bedroom upstairs. Mom asked her what she was doing (thinking her awake). Sis mumbled something incoherent, then pulled her underpants down and sat on the sofa. Mom yelled, “Whoa, she thinks she’s in the bathroom!” We shouted her name and she responded with a sort of mildly surprised, “Oh. Sorry,” then pulled up her pants and went toward the bathroom. I followed her to make sure she didn’t get lost en route. Once in the proper room, Sis again pulled her pants down, sat on the side of the tub, and peed, then got up, grabbed toilet paper, wiped, threw the paper in the tub and walked across the room, and flushed the toilet.
