Adventures While Sleeping

Posted on Friday, January 28, 2011 by Alex R. Cronk-Young


Last night Emmy kept kicking the blanket we were sharing off, which meant she was kicking it off from me as well. The first several times she did it I yanked it back up in my sleep. Apparently at some point I yelled about it. With each subsequent blanket removal I woke up a little bit more. By the point that Zoe started yelling at me I was wide awake, but when I'm awoken out of the state I'm incredibly annoyed.

She started telling me I was doing it myself and that Emmy hadn't kicked the blanket off, but I knew very well she had at least the last time because I was awake enough by that point to realize what had woken me up. Thing is, she was telling me all this with a huge smile on her face, because my sleep antics are apparently hilarious to all who hear of them. Maybe I can laugh about them later that day, but when I've just been harshly yanked out of that deep of a sleep, the situation at hand is the most deathly serious situation I have ever been in. So I don't often react well to being told it was all a fantasy in my head, and that it is incredibly funny to someone else.

Quickly losing the argument that she was indeed kicking off the blanket, and being laughed at while I was arguing it, I told my wife she was being something that you should never say to your wife, and rolled over. Of course, this whole ordeal left me unable to sleep, and after awhile I rolled back over and voiced my frustrations. I apologized and went to sleep. Today we hashed it out further, because wives don't let you forget about things like that.

I've always done strange things while sleeping. They've very rarely escalated to actually getting up out of bed and venturing forth on a mission that I'm unaware of the purpose of, but some form of talking or moving happens probably once a week. I don't like it. Usually when you tell people about it they find it the funniest thing in the world, but by this point it just annoys me. My dad gave me all sorts of anger problems that I've worked very hard to squash, and when I'm asleep the cage door is wide open.

I'm not afraid of becoming violent towards anyone when I'm asleep, but on more than one occasion I've woke Emmy up by yelling at her to stop doing something that I'd imagined in my head. The next half hour is spend comforting her back to sleep, though I'm not entirely sure that she understands why I was yelling in the first place. I've always told myself I would look into solutions if I ever started wandering around the house doing dangerous things, but perhaps I shouldn't wait. If only so that Zoe and Emmy can get a good night's sleep every once in awhile.

1 Response to "Adventures While Sleeping"

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Brian Says....

Wow, I can really relate to this. I know what you mean about people finding things like that funny, but it doesn't feel that way at all to the person it's happening to. I do a lot of really unusual things in my sleep as well, and I don't really tell people because I don't think they'd believe me or think I'm crazy.

This isn't the most recent thing that's happened, but back in 2008 for several months, I'd wake up swearing after having a horrible dream involving my dad that felt incredibly vivid. Fortunately that only happened once when I was sleeping outside of my own bed (and to a lesser degree), but it was really crazy. I'd wake up so angry and panicked.

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