Seven Sleepwalking Stories

When I was a college freshman I got a really severe, Justin Vernon-esque case of mono that kept me ill for about three months. Even after I was mostly better, there was an aftermath. I lived in fear of getting roundhouse-kicked in my enlarged spleen. I had to get my tonsils removed, because scar tissue had left them forever swollen, making me abnormally susceptible to Strep throat and Tonsillitis. Also, I began sleepwalking. These are my sleepwalking chronicles.

March 2007: My roommate and I returned to our dorm room after a party one Friday night. I disrobed and remember lying down in the bottom bunk to watch television and go to sleep. I woke up the next morning on a couch in the laundry room, three floors down from where I lived. I was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs. Bewildered, I sprinted up the steps two at a time until I got to our floor’s entrance. The door required a key to enter, which I had neglected to bring with me. Since it was seven in the morning on a Saturday, nobody was awake and I had to pound on the door for upwards of three minutes before my friend Matt let me in. He asked me what had happened — to which I had no answer — and then he laughed at my morning wood. I proceeded to bang on my room’s door for another five minutes, not knowing my roommate had left our room in the middle of the night to go visit a lady friend. I waited in my underwear in my neighbor’s room until he came back three hours later.

April 2007: I went to sleep in a girl’s bed after we had finished studying for (anatomy!) finals. I woke up with a start and jacked my head off of the bed frame. I had been sleeping underneath her bed. I was naked, with an erection and maybe a slight concussion.

May 2007: I was shaken awake by my roommate, who told me I needed to empty the wastebasket because it was starting to smell. I asked him why I had to do it, and he said because he didn’t want to, on account of it being filled with my urine.

September 2007: I went to sleep at my friend’s house after a back-to-school party. I woke up the next morning in bed with one of the tenants and his girlfriend. My feet were to their heads. I rolled off the bed and left quietly. This time, I didn’t have an erection (maybe).

December 2007: I went to sleep in my childhood bedroom a few days after Christmas, and was woken up around sunrise by my dad, who leaves for work at about the same time as the Gorton’s fisherman. I was outside lounging on our swimming pool deck. I wasn’t dressed adequately for the freezing weather, and was wearing a pair of sunglasses. I had apparently left the sliding glass door to our deck open, leading him to initially believe that an intruder was in our home.

August 2008: Again, in my childhood bedroom. My mom heard noises in the kitchen sometime in the early morning. She came upstairs to see what was the matter, and found me filling a glass of water from one of those five-gallon dispensers you probably have at your office (my family really values hydration). By her estimate, I had been filling it for about 10 minutes without moving, which meant it was overflowing and flooding the kitchen floor. She asked what I was doing, I looked at her, started laughing and stopped filling the glass, which I took with me to my bedroom and set on the nightstand. Then, laughing the entire time, I walked back out of the room, went into the bathroom and took a pee. Finally, I went back to bed.

The next morning, I walked into the kitchen to find it covered all over with towels. “What happened in here?” I asked. “You really don’t remember, do you?” Mom said. I had soaked the kitchen tiles all the way through, and water had been dripping down to the first floor. This was my most expensive sleepwalk.

December 2011: I went more than two years without sleepwalking, or at least without doing anything in my sleep that resulted in anything strange or destructive happening. But then I went to bed in my apartment on a Wednesday night.  I woke up in the morning when my alarm went off. There was red wine all over my white carpet, and an open notebook on my chest. In the notebook I had written about four pages of shoddy but legible notes I was able to identify as ideas for a fictional story about a dude who is regularly abducted by aliens. He befriends one of them and teaches him all about the concept of love.

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