Let me sleep on it

Our series on work, sleep and dreams continues with a story about a sleepwalking postal worker.

Submitted by Recomposition on April 20, 2012

I woke up and rubbed my eyes, Saturday was a long time coming this week. My aching body stumbled towards the fridge. I swung the door open and my eyes focused on the first clear object of the morning, a bottle of Catsup. I grabbed the bottle and stood up, straightening my aching back. I opened the freezer and my eyes focused again on a frozen bag of breakfast sausage.

Then I closed the freezer door and a blurry face slowly came in to focus in front of me. My eyes focused again. I’m getting used to this.

The face was frowning. Then came a hand. It slapped me.

Ah, it’s my girlfriend Jen!

“Do you remember anything about last night?!”

I stared blankly and thought hard and retraced my steps.

The day previously I worked sixteen hours. It took eight hours to get the mail up into the sorting case and there were so many parcels I couldn’t see out the back of the van. It was my second week on the job and I was making twice what I made before in warehouses and call centres. Eight more hours of delivery ended with me falling asleep at the wheel. I woke up when my head hit the horn.

I decided it wasn’t safe, drove back to the mail depot, locked my mail in a secure place at the depot and got in my car and drove home and crawled into bed.

“So you don’t remember any of it?” I thought long and hard about what happened. After I went to bed I had a dream, I dreamt I parked on the edge of a cliff but I remember waking up and realizing I was looking out the window from my bed. We lived in the 17th story of an apartment building and I thought I was still at work.

“Yeah that must have been before I saw you?”

I looked at her confused, rubbing the bruise on the back of my head, “what?”

“That’s when I heard you swearing and yelling, you were saying ‘holy shit!, holy shit!, holy shit! Did you see where I just parked?”

“Really?”

She was smiling now and shaking her head.

“That’s when you came running out of the bedroom talking total nonsense and screaming about how you parked on the edge of a cliff”.

“Really?”

“Yup, then you ran all over the living room trying to find your mail truck, you didn’t have any clothes on. “

“What?”

“That’s when I got worried”, she was talking while she was shaking her head in disbelief “you ran towards the balcony, naked”.

“I yelled at you to stop but you opened the sliding door but there you were, completely naked, yelling about where you had parked, lots of neighbours probably saw you.”

“Shit. I don’t remember this, are you making this shit up?”

“You had better not remember it. If I ever find out you weren’t asleep and this was some kind of prank I’ll throw you off the balcony myself.”

Originally appeared: April 19, 2012 at Recomposition

Comments

Steven.

11 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on April 20, 2012

ha, I can relate to this. Not with work as I've never got that stressed out about it but when I was in school I used to work too hard and not sleep properly, then I'd walk all over the place in my sleep thinking I was late for school when it was only 4 AM, try to have a shower and leave the house half undressed etc...

Toms

11 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Toms on April 20, 2012

I still feel like one of the meanest dreams I ever had was when I dreamt I woke up, took a shower, got dressed, prepared my bag, walked to the train station, took the train and started working only to be interrupted by my alarm. Most dreams like that you don't actually go through a lot of the steps but feel like you did, in that one I remenbered doing every little detail even how well I had washed my armpits. When the alarm woke me up I just could not understand why I had to do everything again as I had done it just some minutes ago.

jef costello

11 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jef costello on April 21, 2012

I used to do that when I was a kid, I'd have these really mundane dreams about my daily routine and then not do things because I thought they were already done.
This series on sleep is really good, I empathise with it a lot.

Nate

11 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Nate on April 22, 2012

Hi Jef, thanks for saying that and I'm glad you like the series. I like it too. I wasn't sure if it would work or not but I'm happy with how it has turned out.

communal_pie

11 years 10 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by communal_pie on May 12, 2012

Aha this is brilliant, thanks for posting, I can relate to it a huge amount too.