Panicked, terrified, I ran down the flight of stairs. Confronted with a door, I knocked. No answer. Back up the stairs, now a little confused, my heart slowing down. By the time I reached the top step, it became clear what had happened.
I had sleepwalked out of my apartment and I was locked out in the cold.
This wasn’t the first time I had behaved oddly in my sleep. For years, I have babbled nonsensically, moaned, yelled, even taken the occasional shower. The problem has only worsened in college, as the possibility of a deep, peaceful sleep is greatly reduced with the loss of my luxurious double bed back home. All too frequently, my roommate shocks me with tales of my unconscious performances, ranging from mild swearing to simultaneously running around the bedroom and screaming. Sometimes I remember flashes of what she says, but the memories are like dreams, totally beyond my control.
But this time in the stairwell, the situation was less than amusing. There I stood, in the beer-stained foyer of Village B, knocking on my door and ringing the buzzer for 20 minutes, hoping to awaken my slumbering housemates, my only hope of reentry. But even as I exchanged polite tapping for uninhibited banging, the girls remained asleep, and the door remained locked.
Finally, I had to consider my options. I wasn’t sure of the time, but it had to be in the early hours of the morning, since I had gone to bed at 2 a.m. and there were still a few roaming partiers drinking away the sorrows of that night’s Sweet Sixteen loss. I had never become good friends with anyone in my building, or even in Village B, at least not enough to knock on their doors in the middle of the night and ask for a sofa.
So I sat on my front stoop and gathered the courage to make a journey to Nevils, where I felt sure my roommate and her boyfriend would give me solace. Though it was frigidly cold out, I had neither shoes nor a coat. Without my eyeglasses everything more than three feet in front of me was a swimming, surrealist work of art. Luckily, because of the cold, I had decided to wear pants to bed that night, but I would still look insane, wandering the streets like a homeless youth in pastel pajamas.
But I had no choice, and so I followed the brick path and the sidewalk to the LXR dorm entrance as Paul Simon’s “Graceland” blared through the night from a townhouse party. I reached the doors just as a stream of people were filing inside. Hoping no one noticed my bare feet and sad eyes, I followed them and slipped up a side staircase.
Here on the third floor of the Lisner apartments, I found both heat and carpet for my near-frostbitten feet. I also found another locked door, and after another round of knocking, realized entry to this apartment was no more likely than to my own, since the upstairs bedrooms were so far away from downstairs noise.
I figured a few hours asleep there on the carpet were better than what I could muster outdoors. Someone would walk by once in awhile, look at me suspiciously, and walk on.
Depressed by the interminable nighttime hours, I decided to knock once more, and I finally met my roommate’s baffled face at the door. I explained, laughed with her at my pathetic predicament, and curled up on the futon.
When I woke up in the morning, I was given a breakfast of eggs and toast and sent on my way in an oversized polyester jacket and duct-taped flip-flops. I came home to tell the tale to the housemates who hadn’t let me in, and one, worried by the real danger I might eventually encounter should my sleepwalking pattern continue, looked up advice online.
“It is very important,” she read from the wellness web site CrescentLife.com, “that if the sleepwalker exits the house—do not delay, it is time to seek professional help.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever be persuaded into psychotherapy. But for now, my bedroom door is staying locked every night.
