Night terrors are awkward around other people

I sleeptalk and sleepwalk when I'm anxious and I experience night terrors on the rare occasions when I am freaking the heck out. No panic attacks for me, no. My subconscious is going to work out whatever's bugging it on its own, using my body to illustrate against my will and usually without my knowledge. It's going to smack my worries in the face, even if that means putting me in a position where I physically get smacked in the face.

When I was four, I fell out of bed while chitchatting about cherries in an empty room. When I was five, I woke up to find a blonde woman in a red dress standing over me wielding a baseball bat (she subsequently popped like a soap bubble). When I was 14 and having problems with the girls on my swim team I terrified my mother with a late night one-sided conversation. I just kept saying "I understand, I understand" and when she asked me about it, I told her I was in the middle of my talk with "a man" and continued on, as if she had interrupted. It got to the point where I wished my mom would come in one night and actually find something talking to me -- like a giant pink rabbit or a hillbilly zombie. Then I could say, "See, my subconscious isn't crazy!"

I used to think acting out my dreams was pretty cool (actually, I still do), but that was before I got to college and realized that other people would witness it. Turns out "other people" are not as impressed by the misadventures of my unconscious.

During my freshman year at the University of Richmond, my lovely and tolerant roommate Chet'la coaxed me back into bed on more than one occasion and once I woke up standing barefoot (gross) in the communal bathroom (grosser) staring at a tall young man leaning out of a toilet cubicle who seemed completely unaware that I was not conscious. Chet'la also discovered that I undergo a personality transplant in my sleep -- Dr. Jekyll and Miss Bipolar.

In my second year, I went to live in the "Outdoor House," which, had it not been for the really cool English class attached to it, might have qualified as a step down from my first year dorm. I had a room to myself and only one real neighbor across the hall. During my time there, I had two night terrors -- one in which a giant tarantula tried to attach itself to my face and another in which my floor and the entire dorm building's floor was covered in cleaning liquid bottles. In both instances, I walked out of my room and proceeded to ramble on seriously to said neighbor about tarantulas and cleaning bottles and not wearing pants (I wasn't, either time -- yay me!).

The comedian Mike Birbiglia also "suffers" from sleepwalking and in his case he jumped out a 2nd story window and hit the ground running in his tighty whities. He now has to wear oven mitts and a sleep bag tied at the neck to bed. So as long as I don't end up like that, I think I'll continue to enjoy my body's inability to tell the different between dreams and reality.