Here’s something weird: I talk to imaginary people. Sometimes, that is. They’re not really imaginary friends — some of them are complete dicks — but they’re certainly not physical manifestations by any means. It’s more of a drug-induced phenomenon, but with the drug being sleep.
I’ve always been a sleepwalker. I remember a few occasions when my friend’s parents would tell me I came downstairs long after I went asleep, walked around for a bit, and went back to where I was sleeping. It’s fairly typical at that age to sleepwalk so no one really worried too much about it.
My worst sleepwalking event happened at age 11 when I was at a cub scout camp. My dad and I were sleeping in the same tent and when I got up my dad asked me where I was going. “Bathroom,” I responded. I woke up about a quarter of a mile away from camp, barefoot standing on a dirt road.
Sleepwalking fun fact: sleepwalking generally occurs in phase 4 of sleep, a state in which your brain doesn’t retain any memories. When you wake up from sleepwalking, your last memory is of you falling asleep.
The camp was in a forest so I didn’t have a good view of the surrounding area. I knew what road I was on (there was only one road in and out of camp), but the road wound back and forth so I had no landmark to know where I was. So I just ran in the direction I was facing. Luckily, I hit the medical lodge which has staff on it 24/7, and a bewildered teenager drove me back to camp.
Sleepwalking died off during my early teen years. Good thing too, since I was utilizing so much of my energy being an asshole and harboring my general disdain for everything.
So I hit 16 and being to have some trouble sleeping. I develop a mild case of insomnia. Sometimes when I did sleep, sleepwalking returned in a weird, bastardized version.
It all started out pretty mundane. I would sit up in bed and think I was in wrong room (this is the feeling in dreams people sometimes describe as “you know I was, like, in my house but it, like, WASN’T my house… you know?” Special note: if you’re telling me about your dream, that where I generally stop listening). Then I’d “wake up,” realize it was my room, and go back to bed. The whole ordeal probably lasted seconds, and it didn’t happen often, so I chalked it up to stress and sleep deprivation.
So that’s how it was for six months or so. After that, things started to get weird.
My first vivid memory of one of these things is I sat up in bed and saw that the floor was getting wet. A slow stream of water was coming in from underneath my door and soaking everything. I got up and moved everything that was on my floor to the dressers, bookshelves, my bed… anywhere where they wouldn’t get wet (I had a lot of shit on my floor). Knowing that everything was safe and dry, I went back to sleep.
That wasn’t my only experience with water. My poor girlfriend at the time woke up to me looking at her with a worried expression. “Move up a bit… you’re going to get wet.”
People first appeared in my waking dreams freshman year of college. There were numerous nights where I had to tiptoe around a multitude of sleeping bodies. One time I woke up and saw the wrong person in my roommate’s bed. I figured I must be in the wrong dorm room. I was halfway down the hall, in my boxers, before I woke up.
I had a throwing knife stint early in college. In my typical disgusting fashion, I’d throw everything in my pockets out on the floor before collapsing in bed. This particular night I happened to be throwing earlier, so next to my bed lay my beautiful, perfectly-weighted knife.
Have you ever seen The Grudge?
The girl who crawls down the stairs at the end of The Grudge, sounding like a permanent dry heave, stared at my from the top of my closet. Normally in my half-asleep daze, these hallucinations don’t really freak me out… this one was an exception. I grabbed my knife, cocked my arm back (good form for under the covers if-I-do-say-so-myself) and then realized something very bad was about to happen and promptly woke up.
A while later, with the same girl that I was so concerned with staying dry years before, woke up to me staring at my closet. “What’s the matter?” she asked, probably scared to death I was going to attack my closet (she’d heard of The Grudge girl who had taken residence my closet).
“The person in my closet is telling us to leave,” I said.
“What?!”
“Oh… uhh nevermind.”
And I went back to sleep. I probably should have told her it was a dream, but in my defense, I was fucking tired.
People who sleep around me a lot generally got used to these little outbursts. When I went camping with my best friend and old roommate, Doug, I woke up seeing bugs crawling all over our tent.
“There’s bugs all over our tent.”
“You’re doing your dream thing dude.”
“No I’m not. Turn on your fucking flashlight.”
Tired fumbling, light switches on.
“Oh… I was dreaming.”
“God damn it.”
Sometimes it’s a little insulting. One time I was working late and I went into the kitchen to grab a beer and ran into Doug. I asked him a random question I had been meaning to ask him earlier that day. So whatever, I was disheveled, and the question probably wasn’t contextually significant by any means, but I still got a little pissed when he answered, “You’re dreaming. Go back to bed.”
It was the place that Doug and I were roommates in that I had the weirdest series of waking dreams I’ve ever had. I had never have repeats of people; in every waking dream they’re different. Furthermore, I get them rather infrequently. So when the same two people showed up every night for a week, things got a little uncomfortable.
My computer chair always faced my bed when I was asleep. This is because I’d internet a bit (OK, a lot) before I went to sleep, then plant my feet on the ground and reverse pendulum into bed. Every night for a week, I woke up to some guy in the chair, staring at me. Something was very wrong with him… he looked like he was in the first stages of decay (or perhaps just had a touch of zombie flu). A girl, probably around 10 years old, was in the corner of my room, hugging her shins tightly, her face buried in her knees, staring at me. A hole was in the upper part of her forehead. I tried to talk to them, engage them in some way, nothing. They just watched.
I didn’t sleep much that week.
My dreams stopped for a long while. When I was on the road last year I don’t think I had one (thank God). In this new place, however, I’ve had quite a few. I walked out of my room to see a woman reading at my table.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Wakeup.
I went clay shooting a couple weeks ago. It was amazing. I talked myself into purchasing a new shotgun the following week. Two days after shooting I chased two guys dressed in black from my living room into my study yelling “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” I decided firearms aren’t the best thing for me to have laying around the house.
So who knows what’s going on. All I know is although sometimes it’s kinda awkward (try dream walking in a 12 bunk hostel room full of strangers sometime), it’s at least generally pretty entertaining.
