Last year, a 19-year-old girl in Colorado climbed out of bed and started sleepwalking. She walked nine miles (barefoot) before waking up. A few weeks ago, a 66-year-old man in South Wales peddled his bike off a bridge. In his sleep. Neither story surprised me (I sleepwalk, too).<\/p>\n
I wish I was one of those sleepwalkers who just wanders around the room, looking confused. No, I have more energy than that.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve filled a kettle and made tea (by reusing the stale water that someone had left in a hot water bottle). I\u2019ve pulled all the sheets off a bed, because I was convinced there were spiders on the pillow. I\u2019ve jumped up and down in the middle of a room, trying to reach the cats that only I<\/em> could see were stuck to the ceiling.<\/p>\n As a sleepwalker, I have a few suggestions for all of you non-sleepwalkers out there:<\/p>\n *Talk to us\u2014it helps.<\/strong> True, you may have to listen to a story about ceiling cats or pillow spiders, but if you play along, we\u2019ll have a nice chat and then go back to sleep.<\/p>\n *It\u2019s okay to wake us up.<\/strong> Have you heard that you shouldn\u2019t wake a sleepwalker? It\u2019s a myth. I\u2019ve cut my eyebrow walking into a door frame, and got a concussion when I fell backwards onto a wooden floor. Sure, sleepwalkers get confused when you wake them up\u2014but confusion is better than bloodshed.<\/p>\n *Quit looking at us like that.<\/strong> Approximately 13% of kids\u2014and 4% of adults\u2014sometimes sleepwalk. And it makes us feel bad when we wake up and see you staring at us like we\u2019re the Kraken. So put a fake smile on your face. And consider carpeting. Seriously. It took me weeks to recover from that concussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last year, a 19-year-old girl in Colorado climbed out of bed and started sleepwalking. She walked nine miles (barefoot) before waking up. A few weeks ago, a 66-year-old man in South Wales peddled his bike off a bridge. In his sleep. Neither story surprised me (I sleepwalk, too). I wish I was one of those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-bits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}