a windblown left side

adventures in semiconsciousness

I woke up the other morning with a sense of overwhelming terror. My memory of the previous night was the following series of slides:

- Drinking all night with Megan and Friends.
- Coming home.
- Getting ready for bed in the guest bedroom.
- Reading in bed for awhile, then falling asleep.
- Crazy dreams.
- Going to bathroom.
- Crazy dreams.
- Being in Megan's bedroom. Looking more or less at the floor. Megan saying something to me. Fleeing in confusion. Going to the bathroom, then going back to bed.
- Crazy dreams. Crazier dreams.
- Bathroom.
- Slighty weird dreams.
- Waking up.

Now, given the amount of weird dreams I had that night, I didn't really know if the episode in Megan's room had actually happened, or if I had dreamed it as well.

So it was with great fear that I talked to Megan the next day - "I don't really know how to put this. Umm.. . what I in your room last night? Do you remember what I was doing?" Turns out, it was real. She had actually not been sure herself if it was a dream or not, because she, like me, suffers from dreams that are strange yet solidly grounded in reality, often making it difficult to distinguish dreams from life.

This is the second time this has happened to me, the first being the infamous "getting locked out of my apartment in only my underwear and having to spend the night at the neighbors" evening. The circumstances in both cases have been similar. I drink a little too much and go to bed still somewhat drunk. At some point in the night I start walking around half asleep, and then suddenly something jolts me awake (e.g. someone talking to me). After the sudden jolt, I remember everything and feel both awake and sober. But I am left with almost no recollection of the events beforehand.

Together, Megan and I pieced together the events from that night. Thankfully, it ended up being more funny than horribly weird or embarrassing. It seems that large trucks frequent her neighborhood, and while backing up, emit a loud, annoying beep that could be mistaken for an alarm clock to the untrained, or alternately, half-asleep/drunk, ear.

The following is a dramatization pieced together from witness testimony. Actual events may have occured differently.

[Megan turns over in her bed to see Ben in her room, intensely staring at her bedside table]
Megan: "Ben, what are you doing?"
Ben: "..." [hits alarm clock]
Megan: "What are you doing?"
Ben: "The beeping . . . the beeping"
Megan: "What?"
Ben: "The beeping"
Megan: "Eh" [Turns over and goes back to sleep. Ben hits the alarm clock a little more. The truck outside stops beeping. Ben suddenly runs to the bathroom.]

There's nothing scarier than waking up and not knowing exactly what you were doing the night before. If these trends continue, I'm going to need friends and family to tape/chain/strap/glue me to the bed each night.

Anyway. I had the hiccups on and off for most of yesterday, which was less than fun. I kept hiccupping right when I was trying to say something clever or funny, so it kept messing up my timing. But, as per usual, it could always be worse. Megan knows of a girl around here who has been hiccuping for like 7 years. She doesn't hiccup all the time, just every twenty minutes or so. For seven years.

Overhead: "*Hic*. Kill me. *Hic. Kill me."

When you are on a road trip, the scariest thing you can hear over the phone is "You're coming tomorrow?" And I heard it yesterday night. If you need me, I'll be the one on the road winging it.

Posted by Ben at August 11, 2003 01:56 PM