Lightning striking outside my bedroom window. I believe I awoke approximately 2 feet above my bed.
Previous cat years ago. I could instantly from the soundest sleep recognize the first cough leading up to a HORK.
Current cat. No horking, but the fricking thing talks. Starts conversations around 2:30 in the morning. I’m thinking of getting a water gun.
There was the weird hypnagogic waking dream where the sky turned red, that was fun. And the one time my alarm clock went off, making a bunch of staticky white noise, and I thought it was a monster growling at the door in my dream.
And of course, that time where I woke up to what I thought was a peal of thunder–except that it kept going and going and going, one long continuous booming roll, while I was running around freaking out. The next day the papers were full of the propane plant explosion in the north of the city.
Last December Oklahoma had a horrible ice storm. I didn’t enjoy waking up to the green flashes of light, hums and pops as multiple transformers blew. What got me out of bed was hearing the tree limbs begin to snap, then thud to the ground… and the roof. About an hour after we got out of bed a 40 foot tree limb crashed on top of the chimney. That shook the entire house.
Since I mentioned it - here’s a photo of the aftermath. Nearly every neighborhood looked like this.
The leg cramp wakeup can be quite painful. Done that.
My favourite has to be waking up with a strange hand slapping me in the face, followed by a kind of rubbing motion. I almost yanked my own arm off grabbing it. Turns out I’d slept on my arm, and when turning over it just followed along. Hard to describe, but very much an adrenaline-packed wake-up.
Some ned outside my apartment at 3am screaming for “Dave” to let him in. This went on for an hour and a half until someone from the building across the way ‘delicately’ told him to be quiet!
I also had a drunk woman knocking on my window asking me to sing along to ‘new york new york’ with her, perhaps I would have had she actually known the words. Living in city centre really has it’s perks, huh?!
One morning, I was having a nightmare that I was being attacked by a swarm of bees stinging me in the face. Only to open my eyes to this staring straight into mine.
poke poke Get up Mommy! Get up!
Argh!
By a friend pounding on our bedroom window to let me know that my dad was in the ICU 90 miles away and might not make it.
That was a long drive I made, alone, at 3 in the morning, with no contact to let me know whether he would be alive when I got there. (He was, and is.)
I was away at summer camp, and I was put in the top bunk of a bunk bed. I managed to wake myself up at four in the morning by rolling out of it. Well, technically I didn’t wake up until I hit the wooden floor, face first.
Large fir trees crushing our house during a severe windstorm.
Were you living around Kansas City at the time? Similar (or the same) incident in (I think) December of 1988. The explosion was 10 miles away, and it rattled everything in the house. I thought for sure that an a-bomb had gone off. Of course, the radio had fallen off the table next to the bed and dumped the batteries all over the place, and my fingers were shaking too hard to load the little double A’s back in the right way.
Leg cramps suck.
The most recent episode was when a squirrel got trapped in the wall. He started shrieking in fear.
And that wall was a foot from my head.
Squirrels can be loud. Very loud.
That’s what happened when I lived in an apartment complex home to someone who liked to work on their transmission at 3 am (around 10 different nights over several months). The ghastliest combination of nails (iron house nails, not fingernails) running down a chalkboard and cheetahs getting strangled to death sent waves of fear and despair running down my spine when they woke me up from my sleep. The last few times it happened I actually went out there to look for the guy but the noise had stopped before I was out.
Incoming mortars and RPG’s. Machine gun fire. Fun times.
There were the shrieks down the street as someone was carjacked then shot (they didn’t cooperate).
When we used to co-sleep with my son, the feel of his fingernail - badly in need of a good cutting - being jammed up my nose and shredding the inside of my left nostril.
The ominous gagging sound of my son, followed by the warm rain of vomit that splashed over my chest, shoulders, face and hair the last time he had the stomach flu.
The last time I had a seizure. I woke up in the middle of the night to a powerful aura, knowing what was coming and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I tried to wake my husband, but couldn’t speak, tried to reach out to him, but couldn’t move. I was trapped inside my body with no way to communicate or move.
Peacefully sleeping in the back of my dad’s car on a road trip, when a White-faced Hornet decided to crawl up my shirt. It got annoyed and stung me right on the nipple.
Pecking and shuffling on the windows beside my front door, just about every morning. I’ve got a crazy bird that eats some sort of berries and poops all over the window sills and pecks the windows. Party bird, looking for a fight. He does this at 4 different windows around the house so far. Looking for my BB gun.
The sound of my mother saying “Go to Toc, Go to ToC” when my cat had caught a mouse in the middle of the night. Laying in bed knowing that that cat was about to appear with a dead or mostly dead mouse in it’s mouth. (Why is that the only time the cat ever ever ever did what someone told it to?)
4AM, camping in the rain. SO’s brother is standing on the road outside our tent, yelling our names. It seems the local creek had overflowed it’s bank, and all that extra water was flowing right where our tent was. Except where where our sleeping bags were, the whole tent was floating. We stepped out into knee+ deep water.
I had a futon on the floor in my apartment right after college. I also had a Fender bass that stood nicely leaning against the wall near my bed, until the day my cat knocked it over and I woke up with a bonk and a tuning peg in my ear. I think that’s when I got a case for that bass.
College: Top bunk lofted all the way up next to the ceiling so that I could have my desk under it and not bang my head when I stood up. And I’m five four. My alarm went off and I slid out of bed as usual, but didn’t really wake up until I’m piled in a little heap next to the bed with my roommate staring at me in horror.
Cat chewing on my hair.
Jerusalem cricket crawling across my stomach. I levitated out of bed. I don’t mind bugs for the most part, but those crickets creep holy hell out of me because of their tendency to gag fall apart at the worst times.
People flinging themselves on me as a way to wake me up. One of these days I will commit murder with my bare teeth, just you wait. Sleep is sacred.
