Our series on work, sleep and dreams continues with a story about a sleepwalking postal worker.
Let me sleep on it
By Phinneas Gage
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.”
This post is part of a series on work, sleep, and dreams.