Comments on: Waking Up Strange

By: Zipora

Zipora — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:06:33 +0000

My ex used to sit up in the middle of the night, lean over to me and scream at me in Spanish for a few minutes before laying back down and sleeping the rest of the night away…it was the weirdest thing ever, but after a few weeks of it I eventually learned to sleep through it….

By: Tanya

Tanya — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 20:38:54 +0000

I used to sleep-walk really bad when I was a kid. My parents had to put little magnetic alarms on all of the doors because more than once my dad woke up to the sound of a door slamming, which was me headed to my grandma’s house, which happened to be across the creek. Not a good situation for a sleep-walker. Then one time, I woke up with all the light bulbs in the house at the foot of my bed. We lived in a 4,000 sqft house with lofted ceilings and we still don’t know how I managed that without waking anyone up. Another time, I was staying in a hotel with a friend, and I was trying to open the door and luckily we had the chain on it because that was what woke her up, me jerking on the door. And when I woke up from it, I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. It took a really long time to relax from that.
I have 2 brothers. The middle one would sleep walk but not do anything, usually just go out in the living room and sit on the couch and pretend to watch TV. My dad would give him a few minutes and then ask him if he was ready to go back to bed. He would just get up and go, never say a word. My youngest brother talks in his sleep, you can have a full conversation with him. I do both. In fact one of my boy friends said that I was more amusing when I was asleep then when I was awake ;)

By: nina

nina — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:26:47 +0000

I work the graveyard shift and to be able to sleep during the day I’ve taken different sleep aids, once while asleep I got up freaked out my kids about not finding my car keys and yelling at them for throwing the keys away…which of course was not true, this one is dangerous…once i missed 2 days of sleep while driving home I made a stop at a red light and God only knows why I took the garage control…pushing the open button aiming the red light!! good thing i snapped out of it in seconds.

By: Ransom

Ransom — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:59:01 +0000

Hey everybody,

All your concerned comments regarding Ambien alarmed my wife and I to do a trial run last night, and all is well. No weird side-effects, I felt fine in the morning. in fact, it didn’t seem very strong at all — certainly didn’t have more effect on me than your average tylenol PM usually does.

demon drug? really?

By: Leah

Leah — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:31:55 +0000

One more nursing-related tidbit! Make sure you both get up and walk around frequently. One of the main complications with long flights is deep vein thrombosis due to being immobile for long periods of time. Walking around will move the blood in your legs and prevent it from forming a clot which could travel to your lungs causing a pulmonary embolism. Very dangerous! This is another reason I don’t think you should take Ambien…you’ll be immobile the whole time!

By: Leah

Leah — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:25:22 +0000

As other people have already said, I think Ambien is going a bit far just to get a few more hours of sleep. The last thing you want to do is wake up disoriented in a different country. Not to mention the risk of something going wrong on the flight. You and your poor wife will be completely incapacitated! Nyquil and Benadryl always put me right to sleep. In fact, I’m working at a psych hospital this semester for nursing school and they often give patients Benadryl to make them sleepy if they start acting out. They even use it in regular hospitals if you’re having trouble sleeping due to stress or anxiety. I’ve never seen a doctor prescribe Ambien, even with patients that have been at the hospital for months. So I suggest Benadryl/Nyquil, comfortable clothes, a warm blankey, and a neck pillow. You could also download a book from itunes and listen to it on your ipod…that would put me right to sleep.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:22:26 +0000

I’ve really enjoyed reading some of these stories!

On Sunday I was on a plane from Chicago to Seattle, and the lady sitting next to me was asleep… until suddenly she started laughing. She had dreamed something so funny that her own laughing woke her up. (She didn’t tell me what her dream was, but she was anxious to let me know she wasn’t laughing at me.)

That has happened to me a couple of times. The first, and most vivid, dream I had was when I dreamed a musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (This was during season 4 or so, so there weren’t even rumors of the season 6 musical ep yet.) I remember that I dreamed the music and the rhyming lyrics, but what woke me up was when the giant singing spiders started tap-dancing. That made me laugh so hard I woke myself up, and I was giggly the whole day.

By: Tombone

Tombone — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:19:12 +0000

I was at an afternoon death by powerpoint exercise when the guy two roaws ahead of me fell asleep. He just stood up and started to make sounds that sounded like a duck mimicking a cow- at full volume. The speaker just stopped and looked at him as did all 150+ of us in the audience. The guy just sat back down and the rest of us burst out laughing. Apparently we were laughing loud enough to wake him and he just woke up and started clapping as if the presentation was over. Once he realized we were laughing AT him, he sheepishly got up and walked out.

By: S

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:41:08 +0000

I went to a military college and we had to provide gaurd duty around the clock. One time an officer came into my room to awaken me for my shift and made the mistake of just grabbing me instead of saying my name first. I hopped out of bed and punched him out cold with one shot and then went back to sleep. Another member of the gaurd team came up to my room to get me since I hadn’t reported in yet and saw the OC on the floor and my room mates laughing hysterically. They saw what happened and were laughing too hard to do anything and too afraid to try to wake me.

I also woke up one night wearing only a t-shirt and one sock, in the snow, trying to unlock my car door with a fork. I told my wife I had to save “Julie” so that we could get married. My wife’s name is Kris and I swear, to this day, I don’t know who “Julie” is or was.

One more thing- try NyQuil. One shot right before they serve the first meal on the flight and you are good to go until you are about 3-4 hours out of SYD.

By: Ramsey

Ramsey — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:17:54 +0000

Anything you can do awake, you can do asleep.

I got my mom interested in playing video games as a way of blowing off steam after a hard day at work, usually a first-person shooter (Quake 2) or fantasy hack-and-slash (Diablo 2). The game isn’t as important as the fact that she often asked me for advice in certain situations, as I frittered away many more hours unraveling the intricacies of the game design.

There were a couple times that she woke me up and asked me how to do things, defeat bosses, and I responded thoughtfully and lucidly. She would tell me “Thanks for helping me with that” later and I didn’t remember any of it.

Now, though, I live on my own and sleep regular hours, so I don’t have… somnologorrhea? Or anyone to tell me about it, at least.