Sleepwalker

~Jennifer~

I thought that since Elizabeth’s last post talked about us sharing rooms, this would be a good time to tell you about the one and (thankfully) only time I witnessed Elizabeth sleepwalking.

I was in the 5th grade and we had just moved to the Bay Area, and living in an apartment while my parents looked for a home. Elizabeth and I shared the bedroom across from the guest bathroom and next door to the living room.

One random night I was woken from my dreams of sugar plums and…whatever else little girls dream about, to find my creepy sister sitting on the edge of her bed rocking back and forth. Yes, rocking back and forth… Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking “Yeah right, this sounds like it’s straight out of some scary ghost movie.” Unfortunately, it gets worse-- Not only is she rocking back and forth like she’s possessed, but she’s repeatedly chanting "There’s people here, there’s people here.”

At this point I’m a little frightened, so I sit up and very calmly say “WHAAAT!!!”

She stands up (only after telling me to shut up) and walks to the bedroom door. I’m a little unclear about what she’s going to do, but at this point all I care about is hiding as far under my covers as I can go (Side note: I no longer let her trick me into taking the bed closest to the door…I now had the bed by the window) . She opens the door a crack and peeks out.

“I was hoping it was your shoe,” she whispers.

She shuts the door and sits back on her bed and continues her rocking back and forth. I ask her “Whose shoe? You saw somebody’s shoe out there?”

“No, stupid!” she snaps back.

As this gets more bizarre, you would think that I’d start to suspect the possibility that she’s not really awake. That would make sense, except the fact that my loving older sister was going through a phase of always calling me “stupid,” so this wasn’t out of the ordinary.

I am now hysterically crying trying to get to the bottom of this, asking her over and over what she means. All she can say is the same thing “I was hoping it was your shoe.” All of a sudden, and I mean from one second to the next, she stops rocking and chanting, and gives me this weird look and asks “What are you doing?”

I again ask her if she saw somebody’s shoe outside our door, trying to figure out if I need to jump out the window next to my bed. She looks at me like I’m the crazy one and tells me to shut up, she doesn’t know what I’m talking about and to go to bed. I watch her lie down onto her pillow and fall asleep. I realized at this point she was just sleepwalking and must have woken up; it wasn’t real. Yet, I still didn’t sleep much that night.

We still reminisce over this story with our family, and I still get freaked out when I talk about it (I have chills right now). You better believe I was praying every night for my parents to find a house where we could have our own rooms…and fast.