Sleep Walking

Millais, The Somnambulist, 1871

When I was a child I read about sleepwalking. I don't recall the specifics. It was always a device used in some story plot, and was seen as a funny thing, a phenomenon that usually got the sleepwalker into trouble. The picture painted in these stories (and in a few TV scenes) was of someone walking along in a stupor, arms outstretched.

This past Friday night, I went sleepwalking for the first time in my life. I hope it was the last time. It was rather scary.

We were visiting our kids in southern California. I've had a bad cough which gets much worse at night time, particularly once I've gone to bed. I suppose there's something about lying horizontal that irritates the lungs. I ended up hacking as if to cough my lungs inside out, and it was most tiring and distressing. Cough drops can help, as can cough medicine, although neither of those was a total remedy.

Having run out of cough medicine, I dropped by a pharmacy before traveling south and bought two kinds of cough medicine--daytime and nighttime. I reasoned that the daytime stuff might have something in it that keeps a person awake, so I needed the nighttime one to let me sleep. I completely missed the rationale that the nighttime one might make a person overly dozey, which is why they produce a daytime version.

It was hard to wake up. And one night, off I went with no knowledge or recollection of the event.  I walked out of the guestroom where Husband and I were sleeping, down the hall, and through our daughter and son-in-law's bedroom, ending up at their restroom, which I had no prior recollection of ever visiting before. I became vaguely aware when I discovered that their flush handle worked differently than most--it's a button rather than a lever--and then more aware as I walked out and looked into their dark room, seeing their bed across the room.  Where was I? I stood there, trying to figure it out, fighting my way through a dense fog.

And slowly it dawned on me where I was. And embarrassment set in as Daughter said, "Ginger, are you okay?  What are you looking for?"

Later they told me that they'd woken as I walked through their room, and she had said to him, "Where is she going?"

Argh.

And that, dear readers, is the last time I will ever take nighttime cough medicine.