Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
It turns out that Chris’s whole family has quite a lively nocturnal life…
Idreamed the other night that I was being attacked by a giant Womble. The possibility of this ever happening to me had never before crossed my mind.
While the dream probably says quite a lot about my overall psyche, it also started quite a lively conversation at a family get-together at ours last weekend.
My mum was first off, complaining how Dad frequently wakes her in the night to discuss his dreams.
This was news to Dad, who firmly believes he always sleeps through the night like a stone, even though he’s up about 15 times and spends as much time in the toilet as he does in bed.
On this occasion, he had shaken Mum awake with the words, “I just dreamed I tried to blow up a caravan.”
“Oh well, that’s not too bad,” replied a bleary eyed Mum. “I imagine that’s quite a common dream.”
Blowing up a caravan is a common dream?
“No, it wasn’t just that,” he protested. “You were inside the caravan while I was trying to blow it up!”
“Oh,” replied Mum, now fully awake. “Well, that’s worrying.”
As Dad rolled over and settled back down he sleepily muttered, “No, it’s OK. I haven’t got a caravan.”
I feel he was surely missing the whole point of Mum’s concern there.
While we were having this conversation, our cat Bodmin, who was out for the count on the sofa, joined in by suddenly growling in his sleep, baring his dagger-like claws, and ripping a hole in a nearby cushion, clearly dreaming about his favourite hobby, murdering things.
A collective shudder went round the room as we tried to ignore him – assisted in distraction by a loud thud from the utility room that had my wife racing to check the rabbits were OK.
They were. Ted the rabbit, it appeared, had fallen asleep standing up, and simply keeled over sideways, making a sound like someone thumping a bass drum.
You may think Ted was participating in the whole sleep theme going on, but he does things like that so regularly it doesn’t count.
All this talk took me back to my childhood days when my sister and I both had a habit of sleepwalking. My own sleepwalking was fairly harmless – I’d get up in the night, firmly believing I was Captain Kirk.
As my dad led me back to my bed, I’d complain bitterly, still fast asleep, and make repeated attempts to escape his clutches with shouts of “Beam me up, Scotty!” OK, very odd I admit, but harmless nevertheless.
My sister’s sleepwalking on the other hand, wasn’t quite so innocuous. Night after night, she’d get up in the early hours of the morning and walk into my room, before pouring the entire contents of the dirty laundry basket over my head.
When I told this story, my sister seemed quite taken aback. After frowning for a moment, she finally said, “Sleepwalking? Why did you think I was asleep?”
I’d always just assumed…
The possibility of a Womble attack had never crossed my mind