I’ve been awakened by hyper kittens attacking my eyelids (my fault, I suppose, but there’s nothing I can do about that pesky REM), by the mail carrier trying to beat down my door, by a loudly screeching donkey, and by a rooster breaking forth into crow while standing on my chest (it was summer and I was sleeping on a cot outside - damn chicken snuck up on me).
Then there’s my daughter’s alarm clock.
She got it from my sister, who got it in (I think) Dubai, and it’s a little plastic mosque which plays a recording of the call to prayer. At least I think it’s the call to prayer. It’s Arabic singing, anyway. And it’s loud. Oh, so very loud.
When you’re dozing on the couch, and you know you’re home alone, and suddenly you hear a man wailing inside the house, and the dog chooses that exact moment to go insane because she hears a stranger - it wakes you up. It wakes you up so thoroughly that you may never go to sleep again.
My daughter is diabolical and will set the thing to go off at random times when she’s not home, just to mess with us (my husband’s been startled by the thing, too).
An insane lightning storm, while camping sans tent, just with a tarp.
The next night bear, sticking it’s paw between the chain-link fence front and wooden wall of a backpacking shelter.
The next night, a bear, not ten feet from our tarp. (It was an interesting trip).
Because my dad was a cruel, cruel man (who knew he didn’t want to be the one to make sure I got up in time to go to school) he trained our dog to come racing upstairs as soon as he let her out and then back in in the mornings. My mattress was just on the floor*, so my days generally started this way: clickclickclickclickpanting COLD DOG NOSE. Followed, inevitably, by reminding my little turncoat canine that she was lucky she was so adorable, because otherwise she’d be toast.
*I have no idea why, but at some point in my teen years it seemed like a really awesome idea.
Gunshots outside the building followed by circling police helicopters with search lights.
Screaming, moaning, and repeated smashing of glass followed by pounding on the front door.
The Muslim call to prayer, right outside the hotel window. Believe me, it’s louder in person.
But the worst was an unearthly scream of anguish that could only lead me to believe that someone was dying or dead. It was my dog, who had caught his toenail on the carpet and wrenched his ankle.
Sudden shit emergency. No slow and gradual wakeup, just eyes popping open and my first thought being “Oh no!”
I scurried out of bed as fast as I could, and my calf cramped on me. I fell to the ground and crawled to the bathroom, tired, in pain, and confused. It was then that I knew that there truly was no God.
Let’s see…cat landing on my stomach when I had a serious case of stomach flu, my husband waking up screaming from a horrible nightmare, and the thunderstorm to end all thunderstorms last summer that made me think half of our hillside was falling on our house.
One night I had a dream that I had been kidnapped and my legs were tied together. I woke up and our cat (fixed) was humping my legs. We now sleep with the bedroom door shut.
Also, the “thump” of a body on the floor, followed a few seconds later by the screaming of a 6 year old who insisted on sleeping in the top bunk even though there was nobody on the bottom.
This was not me - well it was, but I was the one blowing the trumpet at my sister who was notoriously hard to wake. I have never seen her move that fast in my life.
A hot air balloon flaying about 30’ from our window trying to land on the street. The roar of the burner took me a long time to figure out what it was till the whole balloon appeared in front of the window, forcing me bolt-upright.
I once had a fire detector that announced “Warning! Low battery!” when the batteries were getting low. I have no idea what moron designed that, because the first time it went off was at 2 am outside my bedroom door. I woke up thinking I was in a home invasion situation, because I hadn’t heard the words–just a loud, demanding voice ordering me to do something.
Also, when I first got my dog, he was pretty traumatized, having been abandoned at the animal shelter twice–the first time after the original owners had him for five years. It took him a long time to trust that he wasn’t going to be ditched again, and sometimes he’d have nightmares in which he let out the most heartbroken and lost howl you could imagine. It would yank me from sleep and leave my heart pounding, feeling like the entire world was crumbling. Fortunately, those eventually went away.
Yeah, I’ve experienced rude awakening by lightning storm in Florida.
I was just getting off to sleep when an enormous crash literally made me jump out of bed. I thought a car accident had just occurred it was so loud!
I quickly realised that the thunder that followed meant that it was only lightening, and I quickly settled back down to sleep … 30 seconds later, just as I’m dropping off - crash! and I’m jumping out of bed again!!
