Rude Awakenings

/ Diane Henders

My husband deserves a medal.  Not just for putting up with me on a daily basis (which in itself is medal-worthy), but for daring to sleep in the same bed as me.  That’s an undertaking for none but a brave man.

I sleep well, but lightly.  Some little corner of my subconscious always has an ear open, and my entire body is ready to leap awake at the slightest provocation.  This is a problem, because there are lots of slight provocations during the night.

Dreams, for example.  Depending on their content, it’s entirely possible that I might kick, punch, scream, or laugh myself awake.  The laughing dreams are the best – I dream of something so hilarious that I’m laughing my ass off in my dream, only to wake with a guffaw.  The kicking and punching dreams are another matter.  I haven’t made contact with Hubby yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

I’ve farted myself awake, too.  There’s nothing worse than bolting up in bed in the middle of the night thinking, “Ohmigod, something just came out of my ass!  Did I just shit the bed?”  (BTW, I never have.  Just sayin’.)

Back when I had cats, I frequently woke up already on my feet and halfway out the bedroom door, dashing toward a location pinpointed in my ever-alert brain by the sound of a cat horking up a hairball.

I wake at the slightest noise from our back alley, which is annoying because there’s a green space near us and people, especially teenagers coming back from parties in the wee hours, tend to walk and talk boisterously there.  I’d swear those voices are coming from just beyond the foot of the bed.

But the most dangerous situation for Hubby is this:  sometimes I snore.  That puts him in the unenviable position of trying to rouse me enough to make me stop snoring without actually waking me.  It’s a losing battle.

The other night I lurched up in bed with a yell, eyes wide and fists clenched.  Hubby recoiled.  “I just barely whispered your name,” he explained.  “I only wanted you to stop snoring.”

Clutching my chest over my hammering heart, I snapped, “Well, it worked!”

But the rudest awakening I’ve ever had was years ago when I was living alone.  I owned a little two-storey crackerbox of a house with no air conditioning.  There was a giant poplar tree in the back yard, which was great because I could leave the second-floor bedroom window and curtains open at night to get a breeze without worrying about privacy.

I was blissfully asleep one night when a hellish racket and a glare of brilliant light rocketed me out of bed to find the police helicopter hovering with its spotlight trained on my back yard.

That was seriously disturbing because it meant they were looking for a criminal and s/he was too close to my house for comfort; but equally disturbing was the fact that they were looking in my bedroom window with a spotlight bright enough to reveal every detail of my birthday suit.

I think that was around the time I started keeping a set of clothes within reach of the bed…

What was your rudest awakening?

25 thoughts on “Rude Awakenings”

  1. Pingback: Beetle Chips And Other Stories | Diane Henders

  2. Years ago, I woke up because something was tickling my nose. In the middle of a thunderstorm, it sounded like. I was exhausted, completely wiped out, so it took a long time for me to wake up enough to figure out what was going on. Peety, our cat, about ten years old at the time, huge, and in her prime, was lying on my chest with her paws in a muff. She was so close to my face that her nose was bumping mine when I breathed, and she was purring so loudly it probably showed up on the Richter Scale somewhere.. I got one eye open, saw her, and tried to go back to sleep.

    Not happening. She started scratching my chin with her claws retracted. Her game. I would scratch her chin for a while, then she’d scratch mine. I’d scratch hers, and so on for hours. I got her off me, picked her up, scratched her chin and rubbed her ears, and put her back down by my wife’s feet. Scratched her ears some more, and we both went back to sleep.

    Peety kept my wife’s feet warm for seventeen years. Then Peety started keeping my wife’s *face* warm, so we started sleeping with the bedroom door closed. Peety passed away four years ago at the ripe old age of twenty-three. We miss her.

    One of our other two cats, Zoe, started diving off the dresser onto my back in the middle of the night a few years ago. I’ve converted her to an outside cat now.

    Some awakenings are ruder than others, don’t you think? 🙂

    And theventeen per thent! You THERIOUTHLY rock!

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  3. I I recently woke up to find two policemen with flashlights peering around the house because some drugged out nutball was breaking into homes in the neighborhood, and he had been in my home. But I wasn’t naked.

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  4. Hilarious, I love your posts, Diane! I have 2 rude awakening stories, both involving cats. Two of my cats decided to get into a very loud argument in the middle of the night, and the noise set off our alarm. The fight sort-of woke me, the alarm woke me all the way, and the phone call from the alarm company made SURE I was up. They asked if everything is OK; when I told them what had set the alarm off he cracked up! The other story starts similarly, I was awakened by what sounded like a cat fight, hubby was working late shift that night so I was alone. I went out into the living room to break it up and there was a bat flying around the room. The cats were all fascinated and trying to catch it. It would have been funny if I hadn’t previously been scared out of my wits that afternoon by a bat dive-bombing me in my home office. I ran out of the room, slammed the door, called Animal Control and my boss and told her “There’s a bat in my office and I’m NOT going back in there-I’m done working for the day!!!” She laughed herself sick. The cops came out (Animal Control was off that day), they caught the bat but either he or is brother got back into the house that evening to stir things up again. BTW-the house is now bat-proofed.

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    • Bats! Now that’s not something you hear about every day! We don’t have many bats around here, but I quite like them other than their unfortunate tendency to carry rabies. They’re cute little guys… but it’s easy for me to say that since I’ve never had one in my house. 😉

      And wow, that must’ve been some cat-fight if it set off the alarm. Our cats set the alarm off once when they knocked over a small table during a chase, but I couldn’t be mad at them – they were in the basement at the time and the alarm siren was right overhead. They were wild-eyed with inside-out ears for hours afterward, poor guys.

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  5. Oh Diane you are hilarious. I think the rudest awakenings happen for me when we are traveling overseas and about 2 or 3 weeks in waking up in the middle of the night to go to the washroom and ending up slamming into a piece of furniture or smack into a wall. thinking of some other hotels room form the night previous. 🙂

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  7. I suffer from night terrors every now and again, Diane… just after settling down to go to sleep, I start to drift off, all comfortable-like, when something in the room attacks me for no reason and I have to leap out of the bed, and try not to scream as I fly across the room to switch the light on. Then, I settle, breathe, calm myself down, switch the light off and go back to sleep. How very rude!
    I also wake myself up snoring every now and again, so heaven only knows how loud I actually am!

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  8. My favorite rude awakening is actually my son’s experience. He woke up on a chilly winter night, thinking how nice and warm his feet were, until he realized it was because they were covered in fresh steaming doggie diarrhea. Surprise!

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  9. That is priceless! With your writings so intense I’m surprised you haven’t woken hubby up often with some martial arts moves. My own priceless “rude awakening” came many years ago when hubby and I were first married. He’s an ex-Marine and while I understand that most Marines will say there’s no such thing as an “EX” Marine, he wasn’t active duty anymore. We had just purchased a house in the country, nice house, 3 bedrooms etc. We decided to make the living area into a master bedroom since the kitchen had a huge area for a dining and sitting room. We just needed to put some carpet in the new master bdr. While sleeping one night he started to have a nightmare. He was kicking and thrashing about and once the covers flew off I was awake and sitting up wondering what the heck was happening. All of a sudden he was standing up on the end of the bed shouting “Cover, cover! Hit the foxhole!” Then he jumped. Right off the end of the bed onto the cold tile floor! The last thing I saw was a half naked man in bright white briefs flying through the air and hitting the hard tile floor. I couldn’t help myself, I started to laugh. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe! He wasn’t seriously hurt, thankfully, just mightily bruised. Mad at me too for laughing. I don’t think he’s ever really forgiven me for that but I can’t help it. I still laugh.

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      • I’ve often thought of that too. hmmmm, sometimes during an angry moment or two he could convince a jury that it was flashbacks and no jury would convict him! LOL
        Nah, I’d have to come back and haunt the hell out of him.

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  10. I’m the same, I sleep well as long as there is silence! I sleep really well in good hotels that have invested properly in sound proofing! That police helicopter story is terrifying! My rudest awakenings are generally from nightmares, not that I have regular nightmares, but you know that thing where you’re trying to scream in a dream, but no sound comes out (kind of like when you’re trying to run in a dream but your legs won’t move), so you keep trying really hard to scream and eventually you manage to make a shrill noise, and that wakes you up!

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  11. I feel your pain on this one, because I am a notoriously light sleeper. Drives my husband crazy, too. At least I know the kids will never be able to sneak out of the house without me knowing it, so that’s a plus.

    As far as the police helicopter peering in at you, just be glad it was in the days before You Tube. A cop with a twisted sense of humor may have made you the latest Internet sensation!

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