It’s scary when you realize just how sharp the razor in a safety razor is; sharp enough that you cut the back of your head shaving and only know by the bright red slash of blood you see in the shaving cream you pull off with your blade on the next pass. No pain. No feeling of bleeding. Nothing. Not even the feeling of a little “nick” as the blade sliced through your head and opened your blood vessels. Just blood.
And it’s your head, so it bleeds quite a bit for even the smallest of cuts.
Terrifying is when waking up and realizing that you’ve been sleepwalking again for the first time in 20 years. The mirror was in front of me and the nightlight showed just enough for me to see that I had been shaving my head in my sleep.
Thank God I use a safety razor and not a straight razor like I originally wanted. The cuts were bad enough and the blood covered everything. Waking up to see your reflection in the mirror, its face covered in rivulets of pouring blood is startling to say the least. I may have screamed and woken up my daughter and wife. The banging on the wall told me the neighbors heard me as well.
And I didn’t hurt. I’m not even sure what woke me. My head was covered in at least twenty little “nicks,” some worse than others. Nothing hurt. If I hadn’t woken up in front of the mirror I probably would have assumed I was sweating and wiped my face off with my hand or a sheet or something, then gone back to sleep.
I wore a hat for the following week or so any time I went out in public.
Scary is eating food in your sleep. You’re out of control when you do it, waking up full and wondering what the hell you ate this time, then finding that you ate what was supposed to be tonight’s dinner or that you ate something that might have gone bad because nobody in the house can even remember when it was put in the fridge.
I fell to the ground when I woke up sleepwalking again. I looked around me trying to figure out where I was, why it was so bright and the floor so cold. I was standing up trying to figure out why it was suddenly so noisy when the woman on the other side of the check out blurted “Mister, are you okay?!”
I was in a store. Checking out. The conveyor belt in front of me was full of just about every meat item you could imagine, and a roll of toothpaste.
I motioned to the lady that I was already as I looked around at my surroundings and realized I was in a Wegmans. The nearest Wegmans to where I lived at the time was over half an hour’s drive away.
I called my wife and woke her up at two in the morning on a work night. The family car was still in the driveway. My bike was in the garage with a busted tire I hadn’t fixed for months.
Of course I went to a doctor and a therapist. I was poked, prodded, and psyched all over. No brain tumors. No known factors that would lead to something like this. The sleep study was...
Well, the sleep study was weird.
They tell me I spent most of the night talking either to them or to the empty room. I believe them because they have no reason to lie. And because they have video. Mostly because of the video. I don’t remember a word of it. I thought I had slept one of the most peaceful night’s sleep I’d ever had. I woke up refreshed and ready to go, which apparently isn’t normal in a sleep study.
At some point my EEG readings and REM measurements, as well as my heart rate and rhythm all said that I was sound asleep. Zonked out. Yet there I am in the video, chatting away happily to the empty room. I’m talking about inconsequential stuff. At one point I’m talking about modding on reddit, at another I’m recounting something I read about the Minlo’s Theorem, which I know almost nothing about (and that’s painfully obvious in the video).
They asked me back but the next time nothing happened except that I had a really crappy night’s sleep. They wanted me to come back several more times until it happened again (apparently they really wanted to study this because it’s “very unusual”) but they didn’t have answers for me, couldn’t promise answers for me, and told me flat out that they essentially just wanted to “study” me.
No thank you.
Scary is waking up in the morning to find that things around the house aren’t quite how you remember them being. A chair is pulled out or your laptop is open and on when you know that you closed it and turned it off because there was a storm coming and you didn’t want to chance a power surge frying it.
Terrifying is waking up outside with your empty six-tiered bedroom bookshelf laying on the ground next to you and a butchers knife you don’t recognize in your hand.
No blood anywhere, thank god. Not even small specks on the knife. Nothing on the shirt or on my skin. Believe me, I looked.
How I got the shelf out and down the apartment stairs I will never know. I hadn’t woken my wife because she was out of town on a business trip (she’s a power plant inspector). She’d brought our daughter too because with these sleepwalking issues I (and I hate to say this) can’t be trusted alone.
I would do literally anything for my family. That I can’t be trusted alone at night with my daughter absolutely killed me.
When I was a kid I had sleepwalking episodes. The worst one was when I woke up outside the house the next morning. The locked house with closed windows. It was raining most of the night and the cement underneath where I had woken up was dry when I got up.
My parents let me in and nothing was said about it.
Those episodes stopped though, when I started getting really into Wicca and similar pagan religions.
I was a teenager. Stop judging me.
I did a bunch of different things back then. Spells (that I barely believed in then, let alone now) to increase my luck, improve my love life, bring me money, whatever thing I thought could make my life better. I was a dumb kid and I tried the things that dumb kids tried at the time.
But at some point the sleepwalking had stopped. If I thought really hard about it it was around the time that I Smudged the house (you burn sage and walk around the house intoning ridiculous things but the upshot of it is that you’re trying to cleanse it of evil spirits) and drew a huge circle of power or protection or whatever around it.
I did it again. I wasn’t going to. I thought it was ridiculous. I did it.
I had woken up in the bedroom and thought everything was normal. I thought that I was just waking up like a regular everyday person. The clock even said it was around six, which is when I try to get up, so I thought I had had an uneventful night, without even the tiny episodes I’ve had between the huge ones.
I rolled over to find that my wife wasn’t in bed with me. My breath hitched a little bit and my heart ba-thumped out of rhythm for a second but I told myself to calm down. I had probably woken up because she closed the bathroom door or something.
I pulled myself out of bed and opened the bedroom door and heard someone in the kitchen. Had she gotten up early to make me breakfast? That was sweet of her! I hadn’t had breakfast made for me since our daughter was born two years ago!
My daughter who ran around the corner to come greet me. “Daddy, up!”
I picked her up and was very confused. Why was she up so early?
I walked into the kitchen and my wife smiled. “Hi, honey! How was your nap?”
Nap?
I looked at the clock in the living room. I keep it on military time because I’m weird like that and think it’s funny to say that it’s 13 o’clock.
18:24.
It was 6 PM.
Confusion followed. Mass confusion. First on my part, then on my wife’s part. She was confused my panic.
I had gone through the entire day acting like I was wide awake. Watched my daughter, just she and I alone in the house together. Drove my wife to work. Picked her up from work. Made dinner but then went to lay down for an hour because I had a headache.
So I smudged the apartment. I smudged the hell out of the apartment. I drew a circle in salt around the entire apartment building (don’t tell the super because then I’ll have to replant that grass). You better be sure as hell I said all the silly things and did everything I had done before, calling on powers that be and requesting the aid of anything that would listen to me.
I did that after seeing the doctors again. After being told that there was nothing physically wrong. After it was suggested I stay in a ward for a few days for monitoring.
I did it after I stayed there for a few days. They said I had a few sleepwalking incidents but only little ones like finding me sleeping in the main room instead of my bed or quietly redirecting me back to my room when I was found wandering the halls at 4 AM. No lost days. No knives. No super weirdness. I wasn’t a threat to anyone so when I asked to go home they let me.
And now it’s been three weeks since the smudging and circling.
I’ve recorded myself sleeping every night and there’s nothing to report. I sleep like a baby. I lay down in one position and don’t even twitch for the night. I only know that I’m not dead when I watch these videos by the fact that I’m watching these videos. I go to sleep and I wake when my alarm goes off. I feel rested.
I’ve fixed the problem, it seems. Maybe it’s all psychological. Maybe there really is something to smudging. I have no idea. Maybe I just needed a few days away to unstress myself. I don’t know.
And that’s the problem.
I don’t know what fixed it. I don’t know what broke it. What if it breaks again? What if it’s only a temporary fix, again? It took 20 years to rebreak last time; maybe this time it’ll only take 20 months?
It’s scary when you realize you can’t trust your own brain. It’s terrifying when you’re not sure whether it’s your brain, or something outside of it and there’s nothing you can do either way.
Maybe it’s fixed but can I trust that?
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Credits to: JMFargo
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