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Creepy Sleepwalkers/Talkers

deke3

Junior Acolyte
Joined
Aug 17, 2005
Messages
29
Anybody here live in fear of their spouses/partners/lovers walking and talking in their sleep? God, it is so bloody creepy! Haha!!

I don't really have a good story but I'll kick off the thread with an example.

I lived for several years with a girlfriend who would often sleep talk. One night, I happened to wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep. I lay on my back staring up at the moonlight playing across the ceiling and listened to my girlfriend's breathing as she slept. The apartment was absolutely silent. Suddenly, the girlfriend rolled over and sat up looking straight at me. I swear my heart must have stopped. The girlfriend stared at me for a few seconds before lying down and resuming her regular breathing. I, on the other hand, lay bathed in a pool of sweat , eyes like saucers, and unable to sleep until morning.

The whole incident left a lasting mortal fear that always overcomes me when I wake up in the wee hours next to my wife. :lol:
 
My daughter used to sleep walk when she was little. One time I went to the toilet and didn't shut the door so I was facing into her room and her bed was facing out. Not long after I sat down she sat up like a corpse in a horror movie with that dead look in her eyes........let's just say I was in the right place because I almost s**t myself.

Another time it was about 2am and my husband and I were woken up by a loud banging at the front door, it sounded like someone trying to break in. Hubby ran to the hall and pushed against the door I turned the light on and there was our daughter all glassy-eyed trying to open it. We'd put the safety chain on before we went to bed thank goodness otherwise we don't know where she might have got to. She was about 10 at the time.

It took us awhile before we slept soundly again because we kept waking up to check on her.
 
I think I do that. Quite often I wake up in the night totally disoriented and sit up in a panic staring disbelievingly at my surroundings, panting with fear. It must be a bit spooky to watch, it's quite a spooky feeling for me too!

Quite often I also wake up not sure who's next to me (It's always the same person really, before you get any ideas!). Sometimes this feeling lasts for quite a few minutes and I'll become convinced that the person next to me is someone I just know casually, or a colleague for example. I'll lie there absolutely mortified that I'm naked next to a stranger and try to think of a way to sneak out or put some clothes on before they notice. I've sometimes got as far as the bathroom before I realise it's just my confusion at waking up in the middle of the night, and there's nobody more unusual than my boyfriend there.

Ok, that's a thing I do that spooks myself, rather than things that other people do that spook me, but anyway...

I used to have a boyfriend who was an alcoholic, and when he was passed out drunk he'd get aggressive in his sleep (he was also aggressive when he was awake - that was a fun relationship!). I'd quite often wake up to find him furiously shouting at me and kicking and punching me in his sleep. Not so much spooky as absolutely terrifying and probably quite dangerous too.

Most of the time my sleep-life is quite normal though!
 
Mindalai your story about your ex reminded me of something I did in my sleep. I have a phobia of spiders which isn't as bad now as it used to be because I've worked on it but when I was younger it was pretty bad. Anyway I had a dream where I was being chased through an empty warehouse by a giant spider well it must have got me because my husband woke up to find me sitting on his chest and frantically punching him in the face. He almost punched me before he realised who it was, and held my wrists till I woke up.

I swear to this day I was fighting the spider.
 
svart said:
Mindalai your story about your ex reminded me of something I did in my sleep. I have a phobia of spiders which isn't as bad now as it used to be because I've worked on it but when I was younger it was pretty bad. Anyway I had a dream where I was being chased through an empty warehouse by a giant spider well it must have got me because my husband woke up to find me sitting on his chest and frantically punching him in the face. He almost punched me before he realised who it was, and held my wrists till I woke up.

I swear to this day I was fighting the spider.

Does it make me a bad person that I find this really funny?! I can't stop giggling.

In turn you've reminded me of another thing I've done before. I'm a bit of a spider-phobe too and more than once I've woken up convinced my bed is crawling with spiders and leapt out of bed squealing and frantically brushing them off me.

I should really stop sleeping, it obviously isn't safe for me.
 
I am a creepy sleep walker/talker

I began sleep walking after this weird experience as a child:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21989&highlight=.
For about a month afterwards, my mom would find me wandering around the house, quite asleep. She said she would guide me back upstairs to my bed. One time, she even found me tinkling in the middle of the night in the little trash can in my bedroom!

While my sleep walking activities ended eventually, my sleep talking activities continued. I scared the bejesus out of my family -- even more so after the Exorcist aired on TV -- by sleeping with my eyes open and talking in my sleep. One time when I was a teen, I was so dead asleep in our car with my eyes wide open (and breathing very shallow) that my own mother and brother thought I had died.

In college, my roommates and dormmates discovered how fun and creepy it was to talk with me and ask me questions while I slept. I would remember nothing, but apparently I said some very weird and disjointed stuff.

Today, at least once a week my husband (who works 2nd shift) reports that when he creeps into our bed late at night, he is confronted with me bolting upright, glassy-eyed as I turn and scream at him, "Who are you?!"
He says he's always responds something different to me, like "It's Brad Pitt" or "It's Keanu Reeves" and sometimes, even "It's your husband, weirdo!" But by then, I'm already back to my snoring.

JandZmom
 
Does it make me a bad person that I find this really funny?! I can't stop giggling.

In turn you've reminded me of another thing I've done before. I'm a bit of a spider-phobe too and more than once I've woken up convinced my bed is crawling with spiders and leapt out of bed squealing and frantically brushing them off me.

I should really stop sleeping, it obviously isn't safe for me.

No it doesn't make you a bad person at all we find it funny too although hubby is a bit wary about going to sleep if I've had a spider confrontation during the day. I must add that it's not all spiders just the big hairy ones, and no my husband is not big and hairy.

I've done the jumping out of bed thing too thinking there was something crawling over me.
 
My Brother (who I unfortunatly share a room with) Is great a this, He doesn't sleep walk often, I actually only count twice, the first time he tried to go out our bedroom window fortunatly he woke up when the cold air of the open window hit him, and secondly he made it all the way down stairs and into the front room and started screaming claiming that he was surrounded by evil ninja's.

They were more amusing than anything to me...but what scares me is his sleep talking, My brother loves playing games like Resident Evil and on more than one occasion I am just getting to sleep or reading in bed and he will bolt up and start going on about Zombie's outside and how we must get to a police station and find somthing, and he would carry on for a good two minutes about before nodding off again, he was surprisingly coherent but just seemed to be concentrating very hard on what he was saying....

I tell you the first few times this scared the daylights outta me, but when I got used to it I would just tell him he was asleep, which generally confused him, and he would denied it and then lay back down and go back to sleep.
 
I remember when was about 12, I had watched the exorcist that day and was trying to sleep (I've always been an insomniac) I rolled over and my sister was standing next to my bed all glassy eyed, I jumped so bad that I when straight out the other side of me bed, she has stopped sleepwalking now thank christ. My brother just murmurs and says random things like "the glue is sticky on the tigers knees"! and I have a habit of waking up, sitting bolt upright and either scream or say something strange like "there's a fucking spider in my aquarium", I always have night terrors and usually scream or sit up right looking around me totally scared shitless for no reason at all.
 
I get that disoriented wake up thing too, Mindalai and Jandzmom.

I wake up and think the house is falling down and try to run out of the house, or just don't know who my bf is, and have to ask him who he is (we've been together 6 years).

My favourite sleeptalk story is about himactually. He talks constantly in his sleep and is quite receptive to questioning, such that I can ask him about what he dreaming and he will often answer coherently. Freaked me out the first time as he was describing being a dog running in the woods through the mud.. he was well and truly asleep at the time.

Anyway, this one night I was woken by a loud noise from outside, like a big branch falling on the roof or something. I shook my bf and said, "Did you hear that? What just crashed?"

He, still asleep and obviously fighting his own personal battles in his dreams, said with barely restrained frustration:

"It's f*cking microsoft windows again!"
 
I was put on a course of tablets by my doctor, unfortunately the pills had some serious side effects. I began to have very vivid dreams which I would act out. The dreams were very real to me and sometimes quite disturbing.

My long suffering wife would suffer kicks (as I played football for Celtic) and punches (as I fought off whatever baddy was in my dream) on a nightly basis.

The most memorable(?) occasion was when she awoke to find me rolling around the bedroom fighting the evil dwarves who had broken in through the window!

Needless to say she packed me off to the doctor to get a change of medication.
 
I had a friend from uni whose sleeping habits were notorious. She was a heavy sleeper (so heavy it once took three alarm clocks and me banging on the door). As is the wont when a student, we ended up sharing rooms together on various occasions, including when we were both in Germany.

One night, when we were in Germany in her flat, I was woken up by her frantic shouting "I can't get out, I can't get out". Still sleepy, I stayed in bed and asked her what the problem was. "I can't find the door". We had a conversation for about five minutes, with me explaining where the door was and becoming increasingly frustrated that she wouldn't listen. Eventually I fell asleep and in the morning reminded my friend about the conversation. She had no recollection of it at all!

Another time I was staying in her room at uni. I had been out clubbing and came back very late. Trying to be quiet I snuck open the door and managed to find my way to my sleeping bag in the dark. As I was doing so, my friend sat bolt up right in bed and asked me how the night was. We had a whole conversation about what had happend. The next morning, she asked me what time I had come home and proceded to announce she hadn't heard me at all!!!

Her boyf on the otherhand had the wierdest sleep habit of all - she woke up one night to find him asleep but half way through ... with her!!!
 
My friend who sometimes stayed wih me and slept on a mattress next to my bed, used to sleepwalk [but I didn't know that]. So imagine me when one night whilst turning in my bed I found her sitting up, mumbling something. I thought she was awake and said something, when she turned her head slowly and looked at me with these dead eyes many here have described.
So I start screaming, which made her scream...
Needless to say we had a good ol' laugh about it....in the morning.
 
haha! Great stories!

Years ago, when I was touring with a band we had a guitarist who had bizarre sleepwalking episodes. Got to the point where nobody wanted to room with him. Couple of funny incidents:

Scott (the sleepwalker) and a lighting tech, Chuck, were rooming together. In the middle of the night Chuck wakes up and notices that the curtains are slightly open, allowing streetlight into the hotel room. He gets up to close the curtains. As he turns around he is horrified to find Scott standing right behind him, shuffling forward with dead eyes, arms outstretched zombie style.

Despite much protestation we convinced Chuck to continue rooming with Scott.

The arrangement ended several nights later when Chuck woke up to find Scott standing on the adjoining bed, staring intently at the ceiling, reaching up with his hands, and crying, "The bones....the bones...." :shock: :lol:
 
So glad to know I'm not alone in my weirdness!

So glad to know I'm not alone in my weirdness as a creepy sleep talker/walker!

I think the most disconcerting part of the whole thing is that I very rarely remember what I've said. When I lived at home with my parents, I lived in fear that I'd tell them some of my wilder escapades. When I lived in a dorm, and my friends thought it was a great laugh to mess with me while I was asleep, I always wondered what I had said -- if I had shared my secret thoughts, such as hating one of the girls or liking one of their boyfriends. :?

Now, my chicks have come home to roost, so to speak, in that my older son will say some really mean things to me when I try to wake him up, and later when he's getting the cold shoulder from me (and no access to ipod or computer) he says he has no recollection of what he said!

Arg!
 
I've always been too light a sleeper to suffer sleep walking/talking, although when I was younger at guide camp my friends swore otherwise. One of my friends still maintains that one night I was talking about lollipops. However I am not sure how far true that story is.

My little sis used to sleepwalk. We would be downstairs watching TV late at night and she would come downstairs. She always looked awake - she moved fluidly, although she always had a panicked look in her eyes and would mutter something that might not have been real words. Mum or dad would have to calm her down and then she would go back upstairs without a murmour. No recollection of it in the morning.

Do you think there is a relation between sleeping deeply and walking/talking in your sleep? All the people I know who have experienced that are deep sleepers - my sister, my friend and apparantly my aunt as well. I on the other hand, having not done anything like that, am an insomniac.
 
I'm an insomniac too in that it takes me ages to get to sleep. No matter how tired I am once I go to bed I'm wide awake. But once I'm asleep that's it, I sleep like a log. I have very vivid dreams (in colour) and I talk but I don't walk. The closest would have been the incident I described on page 1.

When I was a kid I went camping with my Auntie & Uncle and according to my Auntie. I lifted both legs in the air, I was in a sleeping bag, said "Oh fiddlesticks" and put my legs down. She asked me what I was on about but I was dead to the world. :?
 
My first boyfriend drove in his sleep. Apparently the police pulled him over because he didn't have any headlights on. When they attempted to question him, they realised that although his eyes were open, he was actually asleep. Don't know if it was the first and only time he did it.

Only time I'm aware of that I sleep-walked still gives me the creeps, just thinking about it. I was desperate to do a wee and loathe to make my way to my flat's particularly horrible toilet. It was late at night. I told myself I'd be able to 'hold it' until morning. Went to bed, believing that once I was asleep, I'd forget about it. But I woke up a couple of times, because I was absolutely busting. Looked out the window and saw it was still dark. So no way was I going down to the toilet. My upstairs flat shared a staircase with a dingy billiard room and weird and dangerous patrons had been known to hide under the billiard tables or on the back stairs until the place had closed, with the intention of robbing or just because they had nowhere else to sleep. I needed to 'go' so badly that it was actually hurting, but I must have managed to go back to sleep while desperately waiting for dawn.

Next thing, I awoke to find sunlight flooding my room. I stretched and mentally began planning the day. I felt great. Everything seemed normal. Then I remembered my desperation of the night before. And realised it had all gone away. I didn't feel the slightest need to wee. I wondered how that worked? Did the body reabsorb it or something? So I got up and showered and dressed etc. Then decided I'd better go to the loo, just to be safe, in case I'd injured myself by holding it in for so long.

Usually I waited until I got to work, because I really hated the toilet where I lived. But I went down the hall of the flat (which I later learned was haunted, for real). Then down another long hall filled with junk which connected to the billiard room. Then down a double outdoor flight of stairs and into the filthy, overgrown, twisty, enclosed rear yard that served about half a dozen small businesses in what was a very seedy area. Around a far corner was a clump of trees that virtually surrounded the old, falling-apart toilet block that was used for things I'd rather not even think about by bums and drunks who hung around there, especially at night. The 'women's toilets' were right at the back; they must have been built at the same time as the buildings -- around 1900. You had to push back tree branches to even get into the toilet and it was almost black as pitch, even in broad daylight. Terrified me. I would never, ever, have gone there in the dark if I'd been conscious.

But before I got to the toilet block, I noticed fresly-squashed snails on the old path. And it was then that I remembered. When I'd woken up an hour earlier, I'd remembered what I'd believed was a dream -- of walking down the stairs and along the path to the toilets, in the black of night. And in the dream, I'd felt snails crushing under my bare feet, as I walked. Except it hadn't been a dream.

If I hadn't decided to go to the toilets before leaving for work, I wouldn't have seen those squashed snails. And I would never have known or remembered that my desperate body had dragged me down to the awful toilet-block in the dark and wearing only a brief nightgown .. while my brain was fast asleep.

It chills me to think about it, all these years later. Just thinking about being unconscious while my body made its way there, is bad enough. The toilets were like something out of a horror movie and so were the derelicts who lurked in the yard. But the worst part is imagining how helpless I would have been if one of them had attacked me while I was in that state. Imagine 'waking up' suddenly while being attacked in the dark in a place like that. It would have been a brain-snap moment. Thank god something had watched over me. I was lucky. Hope I never do anything like that again !

(I posted this once before, and people said I should have just peed out of the window or something, if I'd been that desperate. But it didn't occur to me. Guess I'm urine-retentive.)
 
Wow! Your toilet must be really awful if you're prepared to go outside and go off to some other really 'orrible toilet!
Had you thought about just cleaning it? :lol:
 
My own tale sounds quite lame now - I don't, AFAIK, walk in my sleep but have been known to shout out bizarre things ("badgers!" apparently being a favourite) and sometimes kick out at my long suffering partner (presumably because of the badgers).

As a teenager, my brother would regularly sleepwalk and on one memorable occassion came into my bedroon, woke me by taking my pillow, and then threw the pillow out of the open window and calmly returned to his room. He never spoke a word which made it all the more unnerving.

Jane.
 
I've had the waking-up-next-to-someone-and-wondering-who-the-hell-they-are experience quite a few times myself, usually with very long-term boyfriends. I'm glad it's happened to other people, I thought I was going bonkers. I hav had experiences where I've woken up to find myself pressing the blu-tack on a Duran Duran poster (in the eighties!!!!) convnced it would stop the ringing (alarm clock) or standing at the wall, convinced all the plasters coming off. I also seem to have the ability to take myself to the toilet in my sleep, considering the amount of times I'v woken up sitting on the loo, wondering 'how the hell did I get here?'
 
Lol. The toilet block in the overgrown, communal backyard was my flat's toilet ! Something to do with Council complexities apparently forbade installation of a toilet within the flat, because it was annexed to the billiard room. The flat was cheap and owned by people I knew. They owned the billiard room and had lived in the flat themselves for years, before moving on to a new, luxury house. Rather than leave the flat empty, they'd offered it to me for nearly nothing. I think they hoped the presence of a tenant would help quieten down activities in the billiard room and deter break-ins, although I don't imagine my puny presence would have been regarded as much as a deterent. Thank goodness the billiard room closed in the early hours of the morning, which meant the employees (big brutes) were actually safeguarding me, unknown to them.

I was young and saving hard, thanks to the cheap rent. The flat was large and clean (although I owned virtually no furniture). I spent weekends with my boyfriend and at friends' homes ... and during the week avoided the toilet issue by using the facilities at work or at the shopping centre or train station up the street. I was pretty organised and limited my fluid intake after dark on week-nights. Necessity had developed steely bladder control which had never failed me until the night my body waltzed itself off through the hideous rear yard without my permission! Suppose I should be thankful I wasn't carted in my nightgown along deserted streets to the train-station toilets instead :roll:
 
LOL my friend was staying at her boyfs and a few of the other workmates (all guys that she saw everyday) witnessed her sleepwalking naked. I don't know how she stayed working at the same place, I would have left!

When I moved into my flat the water in the toilet was black and clearly hadn't been flushed, or used (thankfully) for the whole previous year. It took some serious chemicals to get it clean. I wonder why the girl who lived there before didn't use the toilet and what she did instead. The nearest public loo is a fair distance away :?
 
ok, so it never happened to me as such, but i remember my mate at university telling me that he'd had the brown stuff scared out of him one night when this born again christian he was sharing a room with on a fieldtrip suddenly sat bolt upright in the middle of the night and started 'talking in tongues'.

incidentally, is that phenomenon covered on this website?

again6 - i'm impressed. i reckon most people would have just dreamt they were on the khazi and then woken up in a puddle. did you find bits of snail shell on your feet and in the bed afterwards?
 
J_Frank_Parnell said:
ok, so it never happened to me as such, but i remember my mate at university telling me that he'd had the brown stuff scared out of him one night when this born again christian he was sharing a room with on a fieldtrip suddenly sat bolt upright in the middle of the night and started 'talking in tongues'.

incidentally, is that phenomenon covered on this website?

Yep; I think everything is.

Speaking in tongues

8)
 
1965, and I was in the Marine Reserves. We were concluding an exhausting two-week summer camp at 29 Palms, in the desert of Southern California. On our last night we had drawn the trucks into a sort of laager with every one sleeping on the ground between them. I drew guard duty from midnight to two AM, and, sleepy and tired, I walked around the camp for an hour or so, trying to keep my eyes open.

Suddenly I snapped to full consciousness and realized I was out in the middle of nowhere. I looked around and saw the camp a good two hundred yards off, and I hurried back, now fully awake. Fortunately no one else was awake and no one noticed I had "abandoned" my guard post.

Despite the fact that there was moonlight, I had managed to walk across rough territory with gullies and rocks and small bushes with my eyes closed.
 
My sister's ex used to scream in his sleep that he was being attacked by "charlie", and then proceed to run through the darkened house, looking for his gun, and threatening to kill "every last f**kin' gook" he saw.

My sister, having been told that it was unwise to attempt to rouse a sleepwalker, usually followed him around, to make certain he didn't injure himself, but otherwise did not interfere with his episodes, and after ten to fifteen minutes, he would return to bed, cursing under his breath, and then return to his normal sleep pattern.

When questioned, he would have no idea what my sister was talking about, and had no memory of the previous evening's events. After much discussion, she determined that he'd been acting-out a dream in which he was a soldier in the vietnam war, and "charlie" was apparently the vietcong.

He was far too young to have served in the war, however his uncle, with whom he was particularly close, had, and used to regail him with tales of his experiences in the conflict. They were married nearly twelve years, and he would continue to experience these episodes relatively frequently, right up until they divorced.
 
I'm led to believe I talk in my sleep, and I keep meaning to record myself one night just to see what I prattle on about.

I fight things as well, and have done for a long time. I think it's something to do with zombies at the moment, thanks to my lovely obsession with them. A few years ago - I think it may have been the night of my 21st - I had a mate kipping on my bedroom floor and I scared him sh*tless in the dead of night by sitting bolt upright, quickly looking around, then dropping right back onto the mattress. I never have any recollection of such things!

I think I managed to have a full-blown conversation with another sleeptalker as well one night, although the memories on that one are very sketchy.
 
When I was a kid my younger sister was a pretty entertaining sleepwalker.

One morning she woke up with the toaster in bed with her, which she apparently had gone down to the kitchen to fetch during the night.

Another time my parents were up late in the kitchen talking (fortunately) when she came RUNNING downstairs and through the kitchen, and ran out the back door into the night, heading down a path through the woods toward a nearby lake. My father had to run full tilt to catch her.
 
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