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It’s slightly alarming to wake up and find yourself on the floor with a small pool of blood at your head. This happened to me as a child. After ruling out the possibility that I had fallen into the plot of a Nancy Drew novel, I realised I had been doing a spot of sleepwalking and had walked off the end of the bed. To add a jolt of drama, I hit the side of the wardrobe on my downward descent. And I’ve been fascinated by sleepwalkers’ stories ever since. The more extreme, the better.
Ian Armstrong from London provides such a story. In 2005, his wife noticed he was missing from bed at around 2am. She heard a lawnmower and when she looked out the window, she was presented with an interesting tableau. Her naked husband was diligently mowing the lawn in the dark. He completely rejected her version of events the next morning until she pointed out the grassy soles of his feet.
It’s surprising what our bodies can do when we sleep. A Canadian woman has driven both her motorbike and car while asleep and now puts her keys in a time-locked safe at night.
The Sleep Medicine journal has documented the case of a 44-year-old woman who turned on her computer and sent a series of emails. One demanded that the friend come over with wine and caviar to “sort this hell hole out”.
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But Lee Hadwin goes far beyond that. Since the age of four, the Welsh Australian man has been producing art in his sleep, despite being unable to do it when he’s awake. It started with scribbles and grew increasingly more intricate as he got older.
On one occasion, he drew on the kitchen walls of a friend’s house during a sleepover, which must have made for an awkward breakfast the next morning.
“What’s strange is I’ve got no artistic talent in my waking life,” he told the BBC. He has mounted exhibitions of his portraits and landscapes around the world and a book about his experiences will be published next year.
And then there is the patriotic somnambulist. Sleep disorders expert Prof Meir Kryger of Yale University has written about one patient who would regularly sit up in bed, sing the national anthem and then happily go back to sleep. Prof Kryger suggests this is of no concern and should be ignored but I don’t know. Being regularly woken up by a lusty rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann at 3am sounds like grounds for divorce, or at least separate rooms.
But the sleepwalking story to beat all sleepwalking stories must surely come from the US comedian and actor Mike Birbiglia.
A regular sleepwalker, he used to have a recurring dream that there was a jackal in his bedroom. He would leap from his bed and assume a karate pose to fight it until his partner assured him there was no jackal in the room.
Then his sleepwalking escalated in a serious way in 2005, as documented in his book Sleepwalk With Me. He was staying in a hotel in Washington when he dreamed there was a guided missile flying towards his room. The missile co-ordinates were set on him, so he decided the only option was to jump out the window.
This would be fine if it were just a dream, but he also decided to leap out the window in real life. Unfortunately for him, the window was closed, and his room was on the second floor. Nonetheless, he jumped through the window, landed on the front lawn, jumped up and kept running. Then he woke up and realised that he was running across the lawn of a hotel in his underwear and there was blood everywhere.
He returned to the hotel’s front desk where multiple phones were ringing.
The receptionist was remarkably unfazed on hearing what had just unfolded. “All right,” was his only response.
And so, the comedian ended up driving himself to the hospital to be told he should be dead, while he had glass shards removed and 33 stitches inserted.
I suppose if you work the night shift in a US hotel, you are probably unshockable. Drive-by shootings, tigers in elevators and assassins hiding in room service trolleys are all in a night’s work, if the movies are to be believed.
But wait – has a US hotel worker ever been faced with an Irish hen party, carrying a giant inflatable man and demanding to get into the residents’ bar at 3am for a round of Baby Guinness shots?
Now there’s a sticky situation that only an Irish hotel porter could handle.