Zzzzz

Some time ago now I woke up one morning to find Boyfriend Andy on his hands and knees beside the bed, desperately dragging everything out from under it while insisting a mutual friends of ours was stuck under there.

For most people, perhaps, this might have been disturbing.

For people like me, whose significant other is a chronic sleepwalker, it's pretty much par for the course.

Unlike ordinary people I have become accustomed to waking to find my partner tangled in the blinds, insisting he is ensnared in power cords or attempting to "hold up" the wardrobe while yelling at me to Get Off The Fucking Bed.

These unpredictable, but inevitable, episodes aren't nearly so frustrating or frightening as you might imagine. They're actually quite fun. Not only do you get the hi-larity factor of recounting them the next day ("and then you said the walls were moving closer... honestly you did") there is the simple but sweet joy of getting to bring your partner out of it.

"Now honey," you say in your firmest but kindest voice, "don't you think you could POSSIBLY be imagining some of this? Is it, you know, logical, that a flying monkey would really be in our bed right now?"

He denies it. Sometimes angrily. You insist, gently but - still - firmly. He wavers. You push. Eventually he agrees. He lies back in bed.

This is the first time he has ever let you win an argument in your life.

Of course there is a downside. There always is. So immune have I, and presumably hundreds like me, become to these fits of fancy in the middle of the night that it is virtually impossible to shake me from my sleepy calm or convince me to take allegations that the floor has turned into a whirpool seriously. I have seen it all and heard it all - sometimes twice in one night.

And so the ultimate, grissly, end to this sorry situation seems somehow inevitable.

"Darling," I say in my Firm Yet Calm Voice, my eyes still half closed in sleep as a masked intruder begins the process of stabbing both me and Boyfriend Andy to death with a sharp implement, "don't you think it's possible this is, you know, all in your head?"