A couple of weeks after I got married, I discovered my wife would randomly shout out words or short phrases in her sleep. Most of the time this happened, it didn’t bother me at all because the bizarre nature of her erratic vocabulary made me smile. When a person you’re laying next to unexpectedly yells, “Leave the umbrella!” you can’t help but chuckle as you imagine what they might be dreaming in that moment.
I would tell her the next morning about what she said the night before and then ask if she remembered saying anything at all. She never could recall anything that came out of her mouth and would usually laugh along with me as I described her sleepy verbal escapades.
All of the humor quickly shifted to terror, however, one night during the first year of our marriage. My wife had gone to bed nearly one hour before I did because I had stayed up late to watch a football game. After the game was over, I shut off the TV and quietly sneaked into the dark bedroom, being very careful not to disturb my slumbering bride. My eyes adjusted to the dark pretty quickly as I walked to my side of the bed and removed my socks. As I was concentrating on taking off my second sock, I heard a rustling in the sheets, so my gaze went to the bed. I saw my wife sit straight up, forming a perfect 90-degree angle. I initially thought that perhaps I had woken her up, but the thought swiftly faded when I saw and heard what came next.
She slowly turned her head directly toward me and exclaimed in a firm yet soft tone, “This is the scary part.”
Many things went through my mind at that moment…one of them being, “I think I may have just peed a little.” Fear then radiated through my body and I wondered if the person I had chosen to spend my life with was, in fact, a murderer. I never ran a background check on her during our dating years, and I genuinely believed her when she told me she loved Jesus…but I’ve got to tell you, I questioned the validity of her love for God in the moment I thought she was going to kill me.
I darted for the lamp on my night table and clicked it on just in case she was holding a knife I wasn’t able to see in the darkness. She looked at me in a daze and then squinted her eyes in angry frustration because I had disrupted her sleep.
“What are you doing?” she asked impatiently, then rolled over and laid her head back down on the pillow.
I stood there for a few seconds, unable to move. The shock eventually wore off and only then did I realize my wife was not trying to murder me in cold blood, but she was prone to more demonstrative bouts of harmless sleep talking. I breathed a small sigh of relief, grabbed my pillow, and slept on the couch…just in case.
Sleep talking isn’t bad at all in the grander scheme of things when it comes to sleeping issues. Everyone has a story to tell about a crazy roommate or spouse who does all kinds of strange things after they close their eyes for the night. In fact, one of my old roommates from my days as a single dude had major freaky sleeping disorders. He once got up from his bed, grabbed a 9 iron from his golf bag in the closet, and proceeded to beat the end of his mattress with it because he thought there was a groundhog underneath his sheets. I now pray for his wife’s safety every week.
People with sleeping disorders (I’ve figured out) are a lot like people who are drunk. One minute, they’ll love everything about you and want to be all snuggly, and the next minute they can slip into a tirade with enough rage to kill you and destroy everything else in the room that happens to be at arm’s length.
The comparison is fair, I think. People who act out in their sleep often have no idea what they are doing and fail to remember their actions the morning after. Drunken people are the same. I know this because I work with college students and often find myself in close proximity to young people prone to party.
Drunkenness on a college campus is commonplace and has been since Prohibition ended in the early 1930s. The idea of blowing off steam and feeling good supersedes rationality, and temporarily fills some very large voids in people’s souls. If you are able to see this issue behind the issue, it can be very effective at shaping you into a person who connects with the culture yet avoids immersion in it. Let me explain.
People don’t diagnose their own problems. Someone would never walk into a doctor’s office and say, “Doctor, I have a slipped disc between my L4 and L5 vertebrae that is putting pressure on my sciatic nerve, causing radiating pain from my lower back down to the heel of my foot. If you could go ahead and prescribe me some anti-inflammatory medication and get me into physical therapy for a while, I should be feeling better in about six to eight weeks.” Uh, no.
They are never going to talk like that, because this is not how people talk. What they will talk about, however, are their symptoms, right? The same thing is true with people’s spiritual issues.
No one is ever going to walk up to you and say, “Hey, you’re a Christian, right? I feel like there is this gaping hole in my soul that can only be filled by a relationship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ. Can you explain to me in detail how I might accept Him to be my personal Lord and Savior?” Again: uh, no. (Well, if anyone does say that to you, it might be a good time to talk with them about the gospel.)
Most likely, people will not talk like that, but they will discuss their symptoms. They’ll talk about things like fear, loneliness, anger, and addiction—symptoms of a greater spiritual disease they are suffering from. They are desperately looking for something to ease the pain in their life, which is why they reach out to things like alcohol, sex, pornography, money, or peer approval. They grasp for ineffective painkillers to assuage the kind of agony that can only be healed by Jesus.
The real question, then, is this: Do you believe that you have what people are truly looking for? Do you believe the only thing that can really satisfy a person’s thirst is a loving relationship with God through Jesus Christ?
If you do, you will begin to understand not only where people are coming from when they talk about their symptoms, but you’ll also be able to help address their real needs with an actual satisfying solution…one that isn’t hollow, temporary, or unfulfilling.
It may feel awkward to engage with someone’s issues on a deep level at first, but people are truly longing for a connection in life. And just think: you might be the privileged person to guide them from their daily struggles of practical pain to the satisfying relationship with God they’ve been looking for their whole life.
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