Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Sleepwalking Night Terror

Occasionally I have night terrors. Normally, about once or twice a week I’ll wake up yelling. My wife is very used to it and rarely even notices now. As a child I used to have trouble with sleepwalking, but it has been years since that was a problem. Last night, however, I had an episode of both. I remembered nothing of the event until I woke up. According to her account, this is what happened: I shouted out her name, and said, “Holy shit! Look at it!” while pointing up at her dresser. This woke her up. She looked and didn’t see anything, so she asked, “What?” I responded by jumping out of the bed and crawling around it like nature show host tracking a wild animal, and again pointed up at the dresser, shouting, “Up there!” At this point she came to the conclusion that I was still asleep, and dreaming. So she instructed me to turn on the lights. I reached up to the spinning ceiling fan, pulled the chain that turns on the lights, blinded myself, and woke up in a fog, kneeling at the foot of the bed. It was utterly disorienting and fucking terrifying. I didn’t remember any of the dream. I had to walk around a bit in our room with the lights on to get my head around what had happened. My sleep was terrible for the next hour, as I kept falling back asleep into nightmares and waking up panicked. Eventually I fell asleep, and the rest of the night was uneventful.
 

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