This thread has really got me thinking. I think weird sleep behavior runs in my family.
When I was a kid (about seven or so), I hated to sleep alone (terrible nightmares), so I pretty much took to sleeping with one or the other of my younger sisters every night (I have three).
When I slept with Baby Sister, about two at the time, I would invariably wake up in the morning to find she’d stuck her hand down the front of my nightgown. It was apparently a holdover from her breastfeeding days.
If I pulled her hand out of my shirt while she was still asleep, she’d sit up and flop over, so that her head was down at the foot of the bed and her feet were on the pillow (and in my face). I pretty much left her hand alone after that. After all, I was seven and there wasn’t much to grope in there.
I slept with the sister closest in age to me for awhile, until one night when she pulled the “oops, I took all my clothes off in the middle of the night” trick while I was in the bed with her. She, being a prude, was totally mortified. I thought it was kinda funny, actually, mostly because she was so upset. (We’d never heard of any such thing before–she was convinced it meant she was some kind of sex pervert.)
I would never sleep with the sister in between those two, because she was a notorious sleepwalker. She would frequently bolt from the bed in the middle of the night and go roaming around other peoples’s bedrooms. Often she would go into a room, open the closet, and root around in there awhile. Sometimes she’d make herself a nice little nest in there and bed down. Once, she thought my parents’s closet was the potty and took a leak on a stack of my dad’s dry cleaning. Pretty creepy to wake up to the Closet Spelunker in the dead of night.
Oh, and I remembered another one: I went on a Girl Scout trip in high school and was hosted by the family of a local Scout. The first night I slept there, I had a dream that I was tearing my clothes off in preparation to seduce a man. I woke up to find that I had indeed torn my nightclothes off–and had popped all the buttons down the front of my pajamas off! They’d apparently flown around the room like shrapnel, because I found them scattered all over the place.
Fortunately, I had my own bedroom and didn’t have to try to explain, but the family did laugh at me when I showed up to breakfast in a striped t-shirt that did not match the stripes on my pajama bottoms.
