I Sleepwalk

Thursday, April 14, 2022

I haven’t mentioned this to anyone, but it seems I’m a sleepwalker.   For the past two years, and this has happened maybe twice a year, so we’re talking about at least four times, I found myself getting out of bed sometime in the dead of night and walking down my hill to Astro diner on Fletcher where it meets Glendale boulevard.   I have no memory of this, but I did talk to people who had witnessed me in this state.

It seems I do the same thing all the time.  I either go to the counter and sit with a daze look over my eyes or even unwelcome; I tend to sit down at a booth when it is either full of people or just two people in the area.  I have been made aware that I always go to the same seat.  One time at the counter, I was trying to sit on a chair that a customer had already occupied.  It seemed that I was trying to sit on his lap.  Or, if it is in a booth, I sit down and push the other person aside.  Either way one looks at this, I tend to go into a booth full of police officers from the K9 unit. Not once have they woke me up, and they usually contact the management there.  The odd thing is I never woke up.   The waitress who works at Astro knows me slightly and knows where I live.   The only saving grace is that my wife notices when I’m gone and comes after me to take me home.  She then directs me back to bed, and then I usually sleep.  By morning, when I woke up, I had no memory of the previous night's walk.

Freud once commented that sleepwalking is fulfilling sexual wishes or, at the very least, a desire to go to sleep in the same area as the individual slept in childhood.  As far as I know, I never slept at Astro’s diner as a child, and my first visit there was as a teenager.  But alas, that’s not true!  My mom told me yesterday that we as a family used to go to Astro’s a lot, and mainly in the late evening.   I would always fall asleep thereafter eating an apple pie and then laying my head on my mom’s lap as a child.  My mom indicated to me that it was a real pain to wake me up from my nap at Astro’s, that they finally decided that maybe it wasn’t a great idea to take me there in the late evening.
Nevertheless, I have no memory of any of this.  My memory tells me that I went there as a teenager, and I had an intense crush on one of the waitresses there.  She was much older than me, and there wasn’t a chance that I could get anywhere near her except to order another cup of coffee.   But I was going there as a teen, and to see her did cause me a sense of dread, anxiety, and excitement all in one package.

Of course, she doesn’t work there anymore, and I (in my waking hours) go there maybe once a month for a Sunday breakfast, but that sense of disappointment has stayed with me for many years.  It is so disturbing that I try not to think about it.