Yie. Thanks for telling me…as horrible as that sounds, I kept imagining even worse possibilities of things you could have been talking about. (It didn’t help/hurt that it sounded a lot like a Munich-related quote) :eek:
Er, sorry about the Quail, btw.
Thanks, and no worries. I did phrase my first post for maximum drama. 
Back in the late 80’s when I was still living with my parents. I used to take my shower and shut up the water without stopping the shower, which of course meant that then next person going in would get their hair wet as they turned on the water. So one day, my father decided to wake me with a bucket of cold water in my bed, yes yes a bucket, not a glass or pitcher, a bucket of ice cold water as I was sleeping soundly. Never ever again forgot the turn off the shower!!!
being awakened in the utter dead of night by the dive master’s burglar alarm system – an installation more than capable of raising the devil himself from his warm abode to come and see what the fuss is all about. great, ever-lasting OG but it was loud! fortunately just the phone line being cranky. no bad guys to hand.
i must have been very deeply asleep, because i came to, i was hyperventilating like mad. the dive master on the other hand rolled over *on * me, trusty bedside semiauto glock w/laser sights instantly trained on the room beyond the doorway. the boy does wake up quickly. 
i was still trying to remember how to breathe and focus my eyes at that point.
not pleasant, certainly, but certainly not as awful as some of the other stories posted here. my sympathies to all on their losses. dear me. what a terrible way to wake up.
(note to self: never wake K up by crashing two pans together. it could be hazardous to my health). :eek:
By an airplane’s evacuation alarm, high over the North Atlantic.
(It turned out someone had accidentially triggered the alarm, we’re not sure how.)
I have had a very pleasant, easy, comfortable life, for which I am grateful.
My story:
Camping trip with my grandfather. Packed in, no tents, falling asleep under the stars in the Rockies, with horse snorfing for background music. In the pitchest black of night, something wet and warm touched my cheek.
I freeze (from terror, but I would prefer to pretend it was rational forethought), while something GIANT and HEAVY pushes on my stomach, and fumbles at the zipper to my sleeping bag.
Freezing in terror is apparently not a long term thing for me, because at that point I started shrieking “Shoot it! Shoot it! Shoot it now!”
Of course, after my taking a big enough breath to do so, but before actually making any noise, the (probable) raccoon left for quieter pastures.
I eventually forgave Grandad for not shooting, but I will never forgive racoons for being brave and able to work a zipper. Nasty fucking little distemper carriers.
June 1991. After 16 years on Long Island, I was moving to Florida. My family and I spent our last day in New York with some close family friends. It was a very long and emotional farewell, so we got a late start on our drive. We stopped in a hotel in New Jersey around 12:30 a.m. so that we could get a few hours of sleep before our first full day of traveling.
Just after sunrise, we were awakened by shouts of “SWAT Team! Open up!” accompanied by pounding on the door. At least six heavily armed men stood outside our hotel room. I ran to the window and saw more armed men surrounding the hotel. After searching the room, they escorted us downstairs and left us to wait in the parking lot with dozens of other confused hotel guests.
We later learned that the hotel’s security guard had been shot during the night by two people trying to break into a parked minivan. The suspects were thought to be hiding in the hotel. I’m guessing that the suspects were found, because we were allowed to return to our rooms about 45 minutes later.
There’s nothing like being dragged out of bed by a SWAT team to make you forget the trauma of leaving your home.
There was a coon incident during a family camping trip. Mother and my two sisters are sleeping in a tent together. A coon unzips the tent and walks up to their faces at which point they wake up. Yelling occurs and the coon dashes out.
I was already using a cheap lock through the zipper for years , because I didn’t want that exact thing to happen.
That does seem to be a common theme. Racoons + sleeping campers = yelling will occur. The little bastards like the smell of toothpaste, or perhaps the smell of food on unbrushed teeth. Either way, I just can’t win, because they’re nasty pushy little demons.
In retrospect, I truly am glad Grandad did not shoot, but it took 15 or 20 years for me to realize that, and another 5 or 10 to truly appreciate it.
I woke my husband up today with a long, hard blow…
on my new conch horn.
Bawoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
awesome alarm clock.
bobettie, you are my new hero!
Definitely doesn’t compare to the rest of the stories here, and it may not even be my worst - just the worst that I can remember.
I’ve taken to dreaming/hallucinating that a spider is running across my pillow. It’s happened four times now. I see it, I freak out, I STILL see it, I put on my glasses and… nothing. I shake the pillow out, check the entire bed, and nothing. Takes me a while to get back to sleep after that, let me tell you.
You live on an island, after all. He probably has killed everything off.
I wake up and find a pool of blood all over my pillow. Gah!
Turns out right before I woke up, my nose was bleeding. What an unpleasant way to start the day.
In Wisconsin. On the gravel shoulder of a freeway. Doing 70 m.p.h., on a motorcycle.
On April 19, 1989, the No. 2 gun turret on the USS Iowa blew up, killing 47 crewmen. My youngest brother had served two years and was chief gunner’s mate in the No. 2 turret. We all went to bed that night not knowing whether Ryan was alive or, if he was, how badly he might be injured. The last media reports that night strongly implied that all in the turret had died. We didn’t dare call my parents because they were anxiously awaiting a call from Washington. We just watched CNN ceaselessly, hoping to pick up some sign of Ryan’s fate.
The phone on my nightstand rang at three o’clock the next morning. It rang four times before I finally picked it up.
It was a wrong number.
Absolutely the worst wake-up call I’ve ever gotten in my life.
Traveling to an SCA event in a roomy van full of people and gear. There’s so much stuff that we layer it – the entire back of the van is filled with a layer of armor, weapons, cookpots, and other hard gear, then covered by several layes of unzipped sleeping bags to serve as padding. Then a bunch of us lay down side by side and slept like sardines in a tin, with one driver and a designated copilot staying awake. The co-pilot’s sole job was to monitor the driver’s consicousness and stop things if the driver seemed sleepy – then one of us would rotate into the driver’s seat. This was a very long overnight trip.
About halfway to nowehere, in total darkness, the driver and co-pilot both fall asleep. Van rolls off of the shoulder, and starts to roll over as the rightside tires drop into a ditch.
I wake out of a sound sleep to find my feet rising over my head and a mountain of steel helmets and hard rattan swords raining down on my face and chest. Can’t see anything. Van brakes squealing and gravel crunching. Everyone’s screaming.
Subsequently the van righted itself by some miracle, and we stopped without injury. There was A LOT of yelling at the co-pilot, however.
Sailboat
So you beheaded him, right? I mean, c’mon!
A friend of mine in elementary school had this happen. Only, it was his mom who walked in to wake him and saw his head on a blood-soaked pillow. It was her scream that actually woke him.
Did your brother make it?