Sleepwalking and Doorlocking: An Unconventional Tale
Lock your door at night. You probably hear that statement pretty frequently in college, especially if you live in a dorm. If you are anything like me, you’ve probably acknowledged the fact that it is good advice, and promptly ignored it. But don’t be like me. Instead, remember that this is college and anything can and will happen. So if nothing else convinces you to lock up before you go to sleep, hopefully this will.
We will call our main character Jen. Jen attends a small college and lives in the on-campus dorms. Jen is your average student—she works hard in school, has a pretty busy social life, and likes to go out and have a good time on the weekend, but never does anything too crazy.
One winter night Jen and her friends decide to have girls’ night in, and sit around in a dorm room playing drinking games and having a pretty good time. Jen has quite a few drinks, but nothing out of the ordinary. She decides to crash on her friends futon because its cold out and she doesn’t feel like walking all the way back to her dorm. She brushes her teeth, gets in her pj’s and goes to sleep.
At 7:30 am, Jen wakes up. She looks around and finds herself utterly perplexed—she has no idea where she is. She gets up and realizes that she was sleeping on the window seat in an unfamiliar room. She runs out of the room and looks at the door. Apparently it is inhabited by 3 girls she has never met in her life. Jen looks around at the other doors and realizes she is on, lets call it Brown hall, which is not the hall that that her friends room is on. She runs back to her friends room (where she went to sleep) and burst into the room to tell her friend what had happened. Her friend confirmed that last night Jen had been sleeping on the futon. Jen and her friend had no idea how Jen ended up on some strangers window seat, but they had a good laugh about it. To this day, the owners of the room with the window seat have no idea Jen slept there.
As the day progressed, things became more and more strange. Jen’s friends laughed about Jen waking up in a stranger’s room, but as the story spread, they started to hear new things. Apparently late in the night, residents of Brown hall said that some “crazy drunk chick” had been running down the hall, opening people’s doors and shouting odd greetings like “Yohooo!”.
A few friends joked that this could have been Jen, but both they, and Jen herself, doubted that this could be true because such behavior was uncharacteristic of her.
A bit later in the day, someone told Jen that not only had this “drunk chick” on Brown hall shouted into peoples rooms, but she also ran into one students room and pushed his very tall wardrobe over. The wardrobe was in front of the student’s bed, so it fell down and stopped inches in front of his face.
Jen refused to believe that it could possibly have been her that, not only slept in a stranger’s room and ran shouting through a hall, but also almost killed someone with their own wardrobe.
By the end of the day, multiple sources confirmed that the girl they had seen running through the hall had indeed been Jen. And then Jen had to face the extremely awkward situation of apologizing the kid who she almost killed (who found the entire incident to be quite hilarious), even though she had no memory of doing it. And, since the school Jen attends is so small, she had the pleasure of sharing a class with this student in the spring, which was uncomfortable at best. She also had to deal with the fact that the entire school heard about the incident and all the students found it so hilarious, that Jen became known around campus as “that crazy girl from Brown hall”.
Now, if the students on Brown hall had locked their doors that night, they wouldn’t have had a “crazy drunk chick” barging into their rooms, a random triple would not have had a “crazy drunk chick” sleeping on their window seat, and one student might not have been almost killed by his own wardrobe. While the mystery of Jen’s sleepwalking terrorism continues to perplex her and her friends, they at least have learned to lock their doors at night because you really never know what’s going on in the night on a college campus.
