From the (as yet unresolved) “Worst way to wake up” contest:
Two particularly unpleasant awakenings stick in my mind:
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Waking up to a tickling sensation on my eyelid, rapidly followed by a painful pinching feeling as some manner of crawling insect BIT the same eyelid. Probably cosmic payback for what I’d done the night before.
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Being awakened by a gentle, but hard-to-identify “whump!” outside the house. Moments thereafter, I discovered that “whump!” is the sound made when the neighbor’s dead tree falls across one’s driveway at 3 AM. Trying to get someone to come out and remove the tree so I could get to work was, um, fun.
Don’t ask me. They don’t all happen then, but the ones which do are particularly memorable somehow. Perhaps it’s the whole WTF??? factor involved in waking up wondering if the house is going to fall down on you any second?
Anyway, I wasn’t used to earthquakes. I’d only felt one small tremor a few weeks beforehand, having moved to California about a year and a half prior to the actual quake. So for me, so far, that’s definitely the worst awakening.
Had I actually been asleep, my choice would have been the evening the police came by to tell us about my dad’s death, but I was in bed but still awake when that happened. 
Mrs Napier was awakened by a cat sitting on her chest bringing her a gift of love, that is, a rat, almost dead. Mrwr… mrwr… MMRWWWRR!
My best was just a dumb old kidney stone.
Hurricane warning siren in Hawaii, but that was more exciting than unpleasant. We were in a safe, strong building.
The one semester I lived off campus in Hawaii, I had a raging hangover the morning of December 7 when the military fighter jets roared screaming what sounded like inches above my building for the Pearl Harbor commemoration.
We did not know it was unpleasant until later, but the day after Christmas four years ago, we awoke because the windows in our condo unit here in Bangkok were buzzing. I got up, looked out the windows, looked AT the windows, couldn’t figure it out. We forgot about it and started our day. Decided it must have been some work going on in a unit on a nearby floor. A few hours later, the tsunami hit southern Thailand and around the region. We finally worked it out that the windows were buzzing at the same time of the big earthquake all the way over off of Sumatra that caused the tsunami. (We also learned the elevators in our building had been swaying at the same time. If you look at a map, you’ll see we were FAR from the epicenter. That was one bad-ass earthquake.)
Setting up camp in the dark and rain. Waking up to realize that the sound I was hearing was a black bear ripping into our food pack about 15’ from my tent. Looking out the tent to realize that there was a thin trail going straight through where my tent was sitting and I, at age 17, was alone in that tent.
Getting to sleep at roughly 0730 last Thursday morning, only to have my mother call me at 0936 and invite me over. SHE KNOWS I WORK NIGHTS.
Several times waking up to the sounds of someone trying to break into my former house.
Waking up in mid-vomit. Thankfully not repeated in a very long time.
Having the worst nightmare of my life and waking up to find that I was actually sitting up and screaming louder than I’ve ever screamed in my life.
Waking up to find that I couldn’t move, couldn’t open my eyes, couldn’t feel my body. Spending several confused seconds trying to figure out what the hell was going on before realizing that I wasn’t breathing. Gathering all my strength and forcing a breath. Having every microgram of my body SCREAM in pain and hot needles in response. Being terrified of dying in my sleep after that one.
Waking up to my now ex-wife packing her bags to check into the mental hospital and blaming ME for her fraudulent “suicide attempt”.
Waking up several times as my now ex-wife physically assaulted me in my sleep.
When she was, oh, possibly four, my baby sister began running into my bedroom on cold winter mornings, ripping off the covers, and running to my mother, who naturally kept me from murdering her.
One of my cousins calledme at 4 am a few months ago by accident; he accidentally hit teh speed dial on his cell phone. The problem was that his mother was terminally ill at the time, so naturally I assumed she had just died and he was calling with the news and became frantic.
Reading those two in sequence makes me feel like a doofus.
The unpleasant feeling of being, quite seriously, unable to breathe, due to a combination of asthma, a lung infection, and clogged sinuses.
The two that stand out in my mind:
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Having Maria (aka psycho kitty) pounce on my head in the middle of the night. She is not declawed and this was a full claws out pounce.
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My daughter woke me up one night to tell me “my bed stinks”. I went into her room thinking she peed the bed or something, only to smell the unmistakable smell of an electrical fire. :eek:
Leg cramps are bad. Done that one, many times. The worst way I have been awakened from a sound sleep was arachnid-based. I don’t have a fear of spiders, other than a healthy respect for the few dangerous ones. I live in a rural area. Lotsa bugs; losta spiders, in season. Mostly outside, though. A few set up camp inside the house during the summer when the food supply is ample, and doors and windows aren’t as tight as they should be. Among these occasional visitors are wolf spiders. Big guys, but not particularly dangerous. Unless you’re asleep.
I worked swing shifts at the time and our family was young and the children small and loud. I often slept downstairs in the guest room while my ever-so-patient wife wrangled the kids. Downstairs with the spiders. (What? Our guests must prove their worthiness!)
After one such split shift, I retired to the lower room and fell into a deep sleep. I was gently awakened by a prickling feeling on my face, as if someone were lightly sticking me with toothpicks. My brain, foggy with deep sleep, couldn’t make sense of the sensation. Was it my imagination? A hair drifting across my face?
No, of course not … it was a GIANT FRIKKIN’ SPIDER rambling its way about the landscape of my head. I jumped (and I mean jumped) out of bed, and swatted the thing onto the floor. I was so disoriented that it got away. It took me quite awhile to sort everything out in my sleep-fogged mind. The one thing that stuck with me (to this very day) was that prick, prick, poink, poink of its pointy little legs traversing my face.
::shudder::
Firefighters breaking down my kitchen door. I had left a pot of chicken cooking on the stove, and smoke was pouring out of the windows.
My mother waking me up to watch tv. It was 9/11.
The sound of my mother falling in the bathroom. She died three days later.
Came in here to mention this precise incident. To have my first waking thought be “Oh my God this is THE big one!” was less than pleasant.
At least “your” kids tell you before they puke on you! Just a couple of weeks ago, I was awakened by the sound of Spencer horking. He got Daddy first, then turned towards me and showered my shoulder. It’s a good thing it was mostly water, because I’m a sympathetic puker. Blech.
I can’t top the actual shooting but I was awakened at about 3:00am by a guy standing right outside my bedroom (screened) window screaming “Go ahead, MFer, shoot me! I don’t care do it!” followed by 2 or 3 loud bangs which I later found out were a pool cue hitting a car hood and not gun shots.
The sound of a woman screaming “He raped me! HE PUSHED ME DOWN AND HE RAPED ME!!!” outside my apartment window in NYC in the summer of 1992 (the A/C was not working and I had the window open or I would likely not have heard it). I called 911. Never found out what really happened.
Leg cramps. Hasn’t happened in a while. They suck. I too have a tale of my mother coming into the bedroom when I was a teenager, in response to my bloodcurdling screams.
Weird Al Yankovic scream VIIIIIIRUS ALERT! (my cell phone ringtone) at 2 AM. It was a fellow Girl Scout parent, wanting to know if about 8 of them could come sleep in my nearby hotel room - as a result of their rude awakening when their tent collapsed on them. Turns out, when you’re camping on the beach with thousands of other scouts, and there’s been a major rainstorm earlier in the week, and the beach is more of a swamp… tent stakes don’t hold too well.
The noise of Something Bad in my bedroom closet. I was in the next room, screaming my fool head off, before I realized it was the damn cat - rattling some boxes. I felt pretty stupid over that one.
Our winner, however: 6 AM on a Sunday morning, the phone rings. This is never a good sign. BIL had died an hour before of what was probably a pulmonary embolism. He was about 40.
Smoke alarm going off in the middle of the night at my sister’s house. They’d cleaned their fireplace and dumped the ashes into a cardboard box. The ashes still had a few live embers that ignited.
Fortunately, the alarm woke us and we all got out. Apart from the carpeting and drapes in the basement, the worst casualty was my brother-in-law who burned his hands when he grabbed the box and flung it outside.
They got an ash bucket a couple of days later.
A long screeching sound followed by a loud thump.
Car tried to take out the tree in front of our house at about 0300. Driver was drunk, died on scene. Sadly, passenger wasn’t drunk, also died. Why the hell he didn’t take the keys, I’ll never know.
Leg cramp.
Cat throwing up on me.
Oh, and being awoken at 4am on a park bench in Prague by two Czech policemen during the communist era. It was near the train station, and I explained that I had a morning train but no place to stay that night. After checking my passport, they just told me not to sleep on the bench but I could sut there.