I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night, and finally fell asleep around 1am. Around 3am I “heard” my alarm go off, and my response was to sit up in bed and try to activate The Clapper that my lights and alarm clock were plugged into. After several tries, I realized that:
a. there wasn’t an alarm going off that needed attention
b. it was 3am, and I don’t get up until six and
c. although several months ago I did unearth The Clapper that I’d been given once, nothing has been plugged into it for years.
I assume that the alarm was part of a dream, but I don’t recall any details.
This is not the only time I’ve woken up and done strange things. A few times it’s been pretty mundane, waking up upset my alarm hasn’t gone off and starting to get ready for work only to eventually realize it’s the weekend.
And back in May I went to a conference in New York. Two or three days after I got home, I sat up and tried really hard to remember the correct phrase that you’re supposed to say out loud in your room to alert the listening hotel desk staff that you wish to extend your stay by a night (because clearly we’re all living in Night Vale, where speaking out loud to invisible listening entities is expected). I tried a few times to say the right words needed to do this with increasing anxiety about failing to get it right before I eventually realized I was in my own bed at home and it was the middle of the night. That time I do vaguely recall dreaming we were still in NY.
How about you? Do anything wacky to act out a dream or be this disoriented upon a sudden waking?
Oh I am confirmed insomniac. When I do sleep. I am a sleepwalker. I have woken up in my car many times. Never driven, yet. I call people. I get really mad because I can’t do everything I want to do. Apparently I have low motor skills, I can’t turn things on, thank god. I can climb stairs, I have fallen some. Broke my shoulder once. My kids and husband have found me in weird places. We have bells on the doors, to alert the house if I am moving around. It is a crazy way to live, I tell you.
I have started to get ready for work or to go for a run at 3 am before. Usually this wakes me up enough that I can’t fall back asleep and I’m left waiting for the hours to tick by until I can go for a run safely.
My husband says I talk a fair bit in my sleep and also make eating noises. I think I’d smother anyone who made eating noises in the middle of the night, but that’s just me.
I’ve also found myself at the computer, struggling to compose something while nodding off in between words. I am lucky that it’s never a work email that I’m writing.
So, pretty mundane, but I wake up in the middle of the night quite often, so I’m pretty active.
I don’t know that this is necessarily weird, but once I woke with a great idea for a story/poem/song/something and I happened to have a pencil and paper beside the bed, so I wrote it down, then fell back to sleep.
Naturally, in the morning, whatever I’d scribbled was indecipherable, so a masterpiece was lost forever.
I remember once having a great idea for a math proof in the middle of the night so I wrote it down. In the morning, I saw that what I wrote wasn’t incorrect, but it wasn’t particularly insightful after all.
The one time I fully woke in the middle of the night, I was in Jr. High, got ready for school and couldn’t understand why my parents wouldn’t let me leave.
I’ve gotten up on many a morn to discover I’ve been awake enough to have deep meaningful conversations with others about things ranging from the meaning of the universe to whether we should buy Jif smooth and creamy or Skippy Chunky peanut butter, with no memory it happening.
We live way out in the country, the 3rd of three homes on a long private gravel lane. We pretty much never get surprise visitors. Even the UPS/FedEx guys deliver to my work address.
Last year at 3 am on a Sunday, a car drove up to our home. The dogs woke up and began running around, barking. I put on my bathrobe, got the shotgun out from under my bed, racked it, and went out to see what was up.
I scared the crap out of the guy in the car. He was expecting to see his brother, but the directions he was following were scrawled on the back of an envelope and were incomprehensible.
