I forgot about the time a few years ago when some asshole walked up to my bedroom window and knocked on it. My bed was just under that window. I don’t know why it scared me so much, maybe I was having a nightmare. But I screamed at the top of my lungs for as long as my breath would last. My roommate jumped up in his room and got his gun. After assuring the asshole at the window that so-and-so did NOT live there, I heard my roomie asking me if I was alright. I’m pissed that I didn’t give the asshole at the window another round of ANGRY screaming for doing what he did.
Yeah, I’m looking for “my friends” (ie, dealers) apartment so I’m gonna walk up to a RANDOM WINDOW and knock on it instead of going to a door. He’s lucky he didn’t knock on my roomies window. He’d have gotten a gun in the face. The weird part was that the guy had a broad irish accent, like he was looking for his lucky charms or something.
Waking to stuff being tipped over and looking out the door to see a skunk 4 feet away sucks. This person also shined the light out the tent flap at the same time, right in the skunks eyes. This was the end of June trip where it was cold and raining the whole week. It froze the corn down into Iowa that vacation it was that cold.
To be serious I once was dreaming that I was in severe pain all over my body,that my arms were trussed up behind my back and my ankles were chained together and that I’d been receiving continual beatings,starvation,mock executions and dehydration,but when I regained consciousness it wasn’t a dream.
My first husband, coming home from partying with his friends. I was sleeping on the couch - he came in, stoned out of his mind, and told me after shaking me awake, that there were demons in the air conditioner and that they had told him to kill me.
Everything was silent, not a mouse stirred. It better not, given that our flat was the 10th floor and mice don’t usually get that far up unless they’re the electronic kind.
It was 3am, an hour when your average college student who’s home for the holidays actually sleeps. Yes, even Spanish students. I mean, it was a Wednesday night, where the hell do you go on a Wednesday night? So, I was asleep like a baby. Probably not even a snoring baby, as sources who’ve been consulted indicate I do not snore.
Then, a flash of light! The lamp lit up, having no effect on me that I recall. My mother (90kg, about 200lb) sitting on me did have an effect, though… :smack:
She’d recalled something she hadn’t told me the day before and wanted to tell me, therefore I had to wake up. Now. Jesus woman, MAKE A FUCKING NOTE and leave it on the breakfast table!
A fraternity brother awoke one Sunday on the lawn in front of the Tidwell Bible Building at our conservative university after we partied way too hard in Austin the night before, with disheveled hair, rumpled clothes and next to a puddle of vomit. He was awakened by the sounds of fellow students as they walked around him on their way in to church.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, summer of '92. Hurricane Andrew. Palm tree through the bedroom window. The funny part is, even though I knew the hurricane was coming, I was so confused by waking up to loud wind/rain noises and a tree on the floor that my half-asleep mind figured I must be dreaming and just drifted right back off.
Sometime during the night, the tree apparently unlodged itself from my room and made its way into my uncle’s car. We (well, my uncle and father; I was 8 at the time) had to get the thing out with some delicate chainsaw surgery. I’ll see if I can dig up the pictures.
Midnight, about 3 years ago. My hubby and I are just about asleep when we hear this large KABOOOOOM!! and the sky lighting up with this horribly eerie orange glow. It gets brighter and brighter, along with a sound that makes me think of a fighter jet about ready to fling itself off of an aircraft carrier. No one nearby has any idea what’s going on, so one of our neighbors and his uncle got out their 4 wheelers and set out cross country towards the noise and bright light.
What happened was a section of pipeline near a gas compressor station roughly 5 miles from our house blew up. The roaring sound was the natural gas racing out of the pipeline and I guess up close it was deafening. Thankfully the local fire departments were quick on the draw, as were the folks working the night shift at the compressor station, so nothing else got blown up but for awhile there it was a bit chancy. Folks near us were convinced we’d been bombed by some evil invasion force and it took forever to get them to believe otherwise.
Yeah, being jolted out of a deep sleep like that boded no fun for me!
BaneSidhe, we had a similar experience, no “Kaboom” but at 3:00 a.m. a sudden tremendous roar that sounded like a jet completely powered up. Just 3/4 of a mile away an above-ground, 24" gas transmission main had ruptured but hadn’t yet ignited. The voulme was deafening. Looking up the street, half the neighbors were out in their robes and the other half were pulling out in their cars to see what was going on. Then the sirens started and word was they were going to evacuate everyone, 1700 homes, for fear of the gas collecting in the lows and then exploding.
It took an hour for the pressure to bleed off enough to quieten to the point that we could try and go back to sleep but that was one freaky awakening. We too were at first convinced there’d been a major catastrophe.
As a teenaged boy scout I was awakened by a younger tent mate to inform me that there was a bear outside. I was scared of the bear and angry at my friend. I told him in the morning, “Dude, if there is a bear and I’m asleep, don’t wake me up. Because all you’re going to do is make me scared without changing the fact that there is a bear out there. I mean, I weigh 105 pounds. What am I going to do about it?”
Another friend was sleeping without a tent and was awakened by a small animal checking out the camp site. He figured he’d just keep still until it went away. But it kept getting closer and closer. Specifically, closer to his exposed head. But he kept his cool. That is, until he felt a nose like a cold wet pencil eraser start poking his cheek. He yelled and fumbled for his flashlight while the critter fled. When he got the light on he saw to his horror that there was a skunk at the edge of the campsite. He didn’t get much sleep for the rest of the night.
Oh yeah…another thing that made me go “HOLY CRAP!!” was seeing the tiny piles of ash about a half mile away from the pipeline that had been cows. :eek:
In boarding school, being doused with cold water by asshole dormmates. We weren’t supposed to lock our doors overnight in case there needed to be a fire evacuation, supposedly, so instead I just wedged the door shut with my big armchair thereafter.
Several times I’ve sprung awake from a deep sleep after hearing my sons begin to loudly barf in their rooms, so I could thrust a bucket under their mouths and then clean up the mess. They owe me for that.
Once I awoke to the sound of our smoke detector screeching as our boiler was giving up the ghost. I really thought the house was about to burn down. Now that was scary.
A college friend of my sister’s once awoke to the sight of his shitfaced-drunk brother peeing in their laundry hamper, which he’d mistaken for a urinal.
About 1964 or 1965, and the Cold War is still very much on. I’m 12 or 13 years old. About 2 or 3 in the middle of the night, the local civil defense siren goes off. I am instantly awake with visions of nuclear apocalypse in my head. I jump up and stand on the bed looking out the window. Why? Am I expecting to see the bombs going off or something? I don’t know, I just was. My parents and brothers rush in my room. The siren goes on for a few more seconds, and my mom starts talking about putting all our canned goods in the car and getting out of town as fast as we can. She’s almost hysterical. The siren suddenly stops. We realize somebody made a mistake.
We had about 20 chicks and baby quail that I had finally brought home after hatching them out at school. The cats got in. Little birdy bits strewn all over the place.
Fortunately, this is the most unpleasant way I’ve experienced waking up:
It was senior year of high school, the year I took anatomy and physiology. I woke up in the middle of the night and discovered that I couldn’t open one of my eyes, it hurt, and it was leaking goo. Naturally my first thought was that I’d some how popped my eye because we’d just studied the structure of the eye a few weeks earlier and I knew it contained goo just like that. Fortunately one of my unamused parents was finally able to convince me I was not being humored, and my eye was fine when a warm washcloth unstuck the eyelid so I could see again. Conjunctivitis is no fun.
If I’d been old enough to remember, I bet having an intoxicated man wearing only a cowboy hat kick the door in, then wave a gun about while demanding to speak to our next door neighbor, would be the worst way to wake up. I was only a few months old at the time, so only Mom remembers that.
