Yesterday I woke up because my toe hurt. I have a bruise under 1/3rd of my big toenail, and a blood blister on the little toe of the same foot. I have no idea what I did to hurt myself, but given I can’t think of a damn thing I could have done during the day, I’m inclined to think I did something in my sleep. My best guess is that I kicked the wall next to my bed. hard.
Surely things like this happen to other people too. What’s the most memorable mystery injury you’ve woken up with?
The worst I’ve ever woken up with is just those mysterious small cuts you get on your hands now and then. Sometimes on my arm, but mostly on my hands.
Other people get those too right? 
Not cuts here, but plenty of bruises.
Just 2 nights ago I got out from under the covers, then my skinny ass body realized it was cold and decided it wanted to shiver while I was walking to the toilet. My left leg decides to spasm on the way to the bathroom, and my kneecap spasmed right into the f’ing windowsill. I got to watch the black-and-blue mark form over the next hour, and the next day I walked like a guy who had been shot back in Vietnam.
I’ve woken up with a black eye.
A separate time with a massive bruise on my jaw and a few loose teeth.
All the fun of being a professional drinker in college. I’m glad it never got worse than that.
In college, we called them “UPBs” - Unidentified Party Bruises. However, I’m clumsy enough that I couldn’t even blame alcohol most of the time. I’ll suddenly notice a bruise, wonder how I got it, and have to think about it for a bit in hopes I’ll remember about when I stumbled into something, etc.
Several years ago (when I was living in Seoul) I woke up in the middle of the night for seemingly no reason.
I groggily thought, “Hey. My hand hurts… huh.”
Then I thought, “Holy FUCK! My hand HURTS!!”
I sat up and turned on the light to discover that I had two huge blisters on my left hand above the thumb. It was an absolute mystery to me where these came from. However, my bed was pushed up against the radiator in the room, which was quite hot (it being winter at the time).
As near as I can figure, I must have been laying on my left arm in such a way that it went numb, and my hand was pressed up against the radiator for some period of time before I woke up.
Now, 8 or 9 years later, I have 2 nice scars on my hand from that incident. One right above the last knuckle of my thumb about an inch long by half an inch wide and shaped like an eye (it looks as if something took a bite out of my hand), and another higher up near my wrist about an inch long and maybe a quarter inch wide.
Weird.
I managed to pull a muscle in my back sleeping just the other night.
OK, nobody is going to believe this. I never showed it to anyone. But I swear it’s true. One morning just a few years ago I woke up with a bruise in the shape of a handprint, fingers and all, on the inside of one thigh. It was at an angle that I could not have made it myself. I live alone and have for years.
It was like something out of a Steven Wright joke, except it wasn’t funny. You know, like the time someone stole everything out of his apartment and replaced it with exact duplicates.
Not an injury, but this morning I found on my drafting board a rough floor plan for a small house. It was obviously done by me, in pencil, late last night after having consumed a few glasses of wine.
The really weird thing about it was that instead of labelling each room as I normally would (bedroom, kitchen, bath, etc.) I had given each room a name or description in some unknown language.
I’ve heard of speaking in tongues, but architectural designing in tongues?
On Monday I went to work and one of my co-workers exclaimed “What happened to your eye!” When I looked in the mirror the whole inner part of the white of my right eye was bright red. It looked like the Fourth of July - red, white, and blue. It didn’t hurt at all, and I have no idea how and when it happened. Fortunately it’s mostly faded now.
I would have thought you get more mysterious bee-stings than anything else. I actually have had cuts on my hands and arms that I didn’t know I had, but I did work with a large chopsaw at the time. I would usually get cuts on my hands and arms from handling the 26" blades, whose teeth were razor sharp. I’d never feel it, and sometimes would see them days later.
SMullen, that story belong in the “Stories that creep you out” thread. I got the chills.
Yeah but I know where the stings come from. 
It’s the quarter-inch slices that mysteriously appear on my hands or arms that have me wondering just what the hell is going on when I sleep.
for all definitions of “a few”>n, where n=what?
Nice. I’ve had the few glasses of wine/unexplained leg bruise phenomenon, largely because having a few glasses of wine somehow motivates me to tidy my house, which has its share of low tables that I need to transit to carry laundry, trash, mail, and whatever other random tasks seem like a good idea after a few glasses of Malbec.
My guess is that you are cutting yourself with your fingernails or something in the night.
No mysterious bruises but apparently I dialed a bunch of phone numbers the other night in my sleep. They’re all in my call log and I don’t know why.
My back injury was a complete mystery. But after a couple of doses of aspirin I decided to retrace the prior day, and voila, recalled lifting a box with an over-the-stove microwave in it. Didn’t hurt at the time, and I’d forgotten because what I was after was something stored behind it that wasn’t heavy at all.
My facebook status from a few weeks back:
You’re sure you couldn’t have had the hand that way, like maybe if you arm was laced through your legs? I wake up with thumb and fingerprint bruises on my right hand and wrist on a regular basis (usually after upsetting dreams), but they’re always a match for my left thumb or fingers.
Something else I hate seeing (which may be tangentially related to the topic) is waking up after a long night of drinking, and seeing “message sent!” on the computer. To someone I hate. And I have no idea what I said.
Hi, all.
I tried to fit my hand over the bruise but I realized that I couldn’t have applied enough pressure from that angle to make a bruise. At least I don’t think I could have.