Sleep walking in Eire

Many years ago I met this lovely in all ways Irish woman while traveling in Crete. We enjoyed our time together so much that soon after she visited me in America and some time after that I visited her in Ireland. This story is about one night in that second visit.

As we traveled around the Irish countryside, we decided to splurge one night on of those period-perfect rooms in a carefully restored centuries old Irish (well actually British) castle. The absolutely enormous room was filled with proportionately enormous furniture from the period and the to die for balcony looked out on vast bucolic fields, as green as only Ireland can make them, divided by impressive expanses of stone walls, and generously dotted with sheep and cows. The stone hallways were unfettered by any modern distractions, lighted by candles, and interspersed with the occasional alcove containing a suit of armor. It was hyperbolically charming, and with the absolute quiet, the perfect place to get a good nights sleep after a day of sightseeing.

So there was no one more surprised that me when sometime in the middle of the night, this Irish lass woke me up by trying with all her might to push me out of the bed screaming at me in a deep and harsh Irish brogue, a stream of unintelligible judgments on my worth interspersed with a frequent heart-felt ‘you bloody bastard’. As I tried, still mostly asleep, to comprehend this sudden bizarre turn of events, I realized looking into her wild beautiful dark eyes that she had no idea who I was, and likely where she was, and almost certainly no idea whatsoever why she was asleep in a negligee next to a naked man she didn't know in an ancient Irish castle.

Well things were going so well at this point that she decided to jump out of bed and run for the door, screaming her dismay in this Irish dialect that I was fast becoming intensely fond of. Of course though it was tempting to feel sanguine about her exit and take the opportunity to go back to sleep, I, being the perfect gentleman, had to jump up myself and run after her. Even if I was totally naked.

As she opened the huge wooden cast iron studded double doors and ran through into the hallway in her skimpy black lace, I briskly ran through after her dressed just as god made me. I still remember chasing after her, our bare feet thudding down the long stone hallway, the suits of armor flashing past us. I wondered how long I had before someone woke up and started chasing me chasing her. I marveled at how fast a runner she was. I should not have been surprised since I knew she had run track and was an active Dublin scene punk rock drummer, both of which reasonably gave her impressive speed and endurance.

But terror comes with physical amplification and soon enough I caught up with her and grabbed her around her waist. As I touched her, she instantly came to a stop and stopped struggling. She looked at me with sudden and complete recognition and just as if this was some lame trick I was playing on her, innocently asked me ‘what the hell are you doing?’

We both hurried back to room hoping that we could get back there before anyone else caught us. Once she realized what had happened, she apologized “Yes this sometimes happens to me. I am a sleep walker’. I don’t know if I would have preferred to be told this before we started sleeping together. I suspect like the Buddhist dogma says, its the time of most surprise when we learn the most.

The rest of this vacation together was comparably uneventful and we parted amicably when I flew home. We have not gotten together again since. But I will always remember that night and my wild winsome Irish friend with the sleep walking habit fondly.