Dangerous Bedfellows
by Rosalind Kaplan
I recently punched my husband in the face. To be more specific, in the left eye. He said he saw stars when my fist slammed into him at 5:30 am, just as he was rising to get ready for work.
I’d like to tell you it was an accident, but that’s not exactly true. I didn’t intend to hit my husband, but I did mean to punch someone else: the person who, in my early-morning dream, was attacking me and holding me down. Later, Larry told me I was agitated and whimpering in my sleep, so he put his hand on my shoulder to comfort me. I misinterpreted his touch as part of the assault.
I felt myself pull my right arm back to prepare, then deliver the blow. I remember this clearly. I was at least partially conscious because when Larry yelled, “Ow! You punched me in the eye!” I knew immediately what had happened. It flashed through my mind that my trainer in the gym, who’d been teaching me some kickboxing, had told me that I have a mean right hook.
I jumped up, instantly awake, and went to get an ice pack. I followed him into the bathroom to peer at his eye in the light. Slightly swollen, but no shiner to speak of, at least not yet. He’d already forgiven me, but I felt terrible. In 37 years of marriage, almost 40 in our partnership, neither of us had ever struck the other.
Of course we’ve argued many times. I can’t remember what most of the arguments were about. Our spats have included, at their worst, one or both of us raising our voices, slamming doors, sleeping in the guest room or storming out of the house. One time, I even took the dog, but a few blocks from home, I realized I had no idea where I would go or what I would do. I went home, went to sleep and we made up in the morning.
I’m not the only one who can be volatile; Larry once threw a tuna melt sandwich at the kitchen wall because he felt I’d unduly criticized him when I told him he’d burnt the bread. I thought it was obvious, as the sandwiches were charred black. He disagreed. Afterwards, he went outside for some air while I cleaned up cheddar cheese that was oozing down the wallpaper onto the chair rail molding.
But bodily violence? Never, until now. I won’t lie: I may have wanted to punch him in the eye a couple of times, and he probably wanted to do the same to me; I don’t think you can live with someone for 40 years without moments of extreme frustration. But we’re both adults with reasonable impulse control. The blows remained imaginary.
I once told him that if he started acting like his father, I would smother him in his sleep. As he’s aged, he has in fact acquired some of his father’s mannerisms, like asking where the salt is when he’s standing right in front of it. But I love Larry, and while he sometimes exasperates me, I have no intention of following through on my threat.
Nevertheless, it now seems that I’ve become a dangerous bedfellow.
The nightmares aren’t new. I’ve always had vivid dreams, sometimes pleasant and sometimes disturbing. The worst, the ones that are true nightmares, always seem to happen in clusters, always in the late fall between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. The Season to be Jolly, but only for some people, not for me.
The holiday season is itself a bit of a nightmare for me, a time of old and recurrent trauma. Thanksgiving marks the anniversary of Larry’s ruptured colon and peritonitis, which nearly killed him. Christmas Eve is the anniversary of my mother’s sudden, premature death.
To complicate that, due to a combination of geography and family dynamics, I have very little family to gather at the holiday table. Kids 3,000 miles away can’t justify flying in for just a long weekend. My Canadian cousins don’t celebrate American Thanksgiving, nor does my brother, who is very religious. Larry and I stay busy and spend time with friends, but I can’t help feeling that we are missing out on the warm, cinnamon-scented, candlelit celebrations I imagine other families having. I feel left out, left behind, bereft.
My rational self says that “imagine” is the key word. I know that many others out there struggle through the holidays as I do or in more substantial ways. I know that the smiling faces of families dressed in matching striped pyjamas don’t tell the true story.
For years I’ve told others that you can never know what’s going on behind someone else’s closed door. I try to take my own advice. During a relaxing day at home or a fun evening with friends, I might forget my seasonal woe, but at night those pesky nightmares are there to remind me of loneliness and losses.
You’d think that, if my bad dreams are a result of old trauma and/or current circumstances, psychotherapy or medication should be able to quell them, or at least eliminate screaming and punching. Therapy and medication have been excellent management for my longstanding depression and anxiety. CBT-I, a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy developed specifically to address insomnia, has worked wonders on my ability to fall asleep and stay asleep.
But the nightmares are stubborn. I’ve tried PTSD treatments, dream diaries and even a technique called lucid dreaming which, in theory, would afford me some control over my dream content. Yet the nightmares keep returning, no matter how resilient I’ve otherwise become.
Part of the problem is that dreams are elusive. There are many theories about why we dream: dreams may be random electrical signals, or perhaps they occur to prune unnecessary neural connections and remove mental clutter. Or they may exist to allow reorganization of thoughts and images, so that new solutions to waking-life problems are discovered.
In other words, there is a spectrum of ideas about dreaming, ranging from the purely physiological function of keeping the brain active, to purely psychological fodder, in which they can be interpreted for self-understanding. There you have it: if we don’t even know why or how dreams occur, it’s a tall order to change or eliminate them.
My dreams seem to serve multiple purposes. Sometimes their content appears to be random, extraneous images from my day. Other times, I wake from a dream and find I have found the answer to some question that had been plaguing me the day before. For example, one evening I couldn’t remember the name of someone I hadn’t seen for a while. The next morning, the name was right on the tip of my tongue. I can find useful interpretations of some dreams, but others, like being held down by an unknown assailant, are more obtuse. They suggest a general feeling of fear and anxiety, but I can’t relate them to recent life events.
Punching Larry while dreaming made me worry that I might have a serious problem, something called REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, or RBD. During REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when most dreaming occurs, our bodies are supposed to be essentially paralyzed, so we can’t perform physical actions. But in RBD, the dreamer is able to move, and acts out dreams physically.
I clearly remember an episode of This American Life on NPR radio featuring the comedian Mike Birbiglia, who was diagnosed with RBD. He described episodes that became increasingly dangerous, culminating in jumping out of a second-story hotel window when he dreamed that a guided missile was aimed at him and about to be fired.
Birbiglia was prescribed medication to suppress REM sleep. Pharmaceuticals are not 100% effective for this problem, so after his harrowing missile experience, he also went to sleep zipped tightly into a sleeping bag, with mittens on his hands to prevent him from breaking free. Because Birbiglia is very funny, his monologue had me in stitches. But it was also sad and frightening, as much comedy is when you delve into what lies behind it. The idea of actually having RBD is terrifying to me.
I thought my recent dream episode sounded a lot like RBD. Should I have a sleep study? See a specialist? Some research informed me that the antidepressant medication I take can cause abnormalities in REM sleep. But that seems a moot point, because it’s clear from my reading that I was not actually asleep when I threw that punch. The impetus for the punch was misinterpretation of an environmental cue as I emerged from sleep, something called confusional arousal. So I’ll hold off on any medical evaluation unless there’s a repeat performance.
Of course, I worry that I’ll have another nightmare and hurt my husband again. To prevent this, the plan moving forward is that Larry will not touch me or try to wake me when he sees that I’m having a bad dream. Just in case that isn’t enough, we’ve considered a helmet or a layer of bubble wrap to protect him, but both seem impractical and uncomfortable. Instead, he’ll jump out of bed and run out of the bedroom. With luck, it won’t happen any time soon. We’ve survived the Jolly Season this year. He should be safe until next Thanksgiving.
Copyright © 2026 by Rosalind Kaplan
