Sleeping Overtime

I got a message from a student saying she was sorry that she absent today.  (All my students agree that absent should be a verb.)  She explained that the alarm didn't work, so she slept overtime.  I wonder if we could get some kind of extra pay for sleeping overtime. 

We're now doing a unit on sleep in my ESL intermediate listening and speaking class, so I just finished interviewing my sister, who I thought had a really interesting sleep experience, but she didn't want to talk about it, so I'll use the one of her and me in Madrid:

My sister and I shared a bedroom in Madrid, Spain, and one night when we were sleeping, my sister woke up and felt a hand around her wrist.  She thought maybe I had grabbed hold of her wrist, so she said, "Tina?"
I said, "Huh?" and when she heard my voice coming from the other side of the room--not near enough to be the person with the hand around her wrist, she screamed, "Tina!"  I immediately understood that someone was in the room with us, so I started throwing things while trying to reach the light.  I wanted whoever had come in to go out! 

But when I reached the lightswitch and turned on the light, nobody was there except my sister and I. 
I asked, "Suzy, what's wrong?" and she looked down at her wrist and said, "Oh, it's my hand that's around my wrist." 

But I have so many other stories pertaining to sleep.

Once Mom, an honor student and avid reader, surprised her teacher by failing a reading test.  Mom explained, "Oh, it was so boring that I fell asleep."

When I was twelve and spent the night with a friend, she told me that I woke her up with a poem I kept reciting.  "Roses are red.  Violets are blue.  Some poems rhyme, And others don't."  She said I kept saying it, but it my dream a lot was happening between my saying it each time.

When I hitchhiked with Andrea, I'd always go to sleep in the back seat, and she'd have to entertain our driver.  One day she got in the back seat so I'd have to entertain our driver.  But I still fell asleep. 

Once on my way to see my brother, I was fighting against sleep because I kept coming very close to dozing off.  I finally took the exit off the freeway and drove until I was a block away from his residence.  Then I dozed off and drove into a ditch. 

When I had just given birth and was nursing my baby "on command," my baby wanted to eat every hour, so I wasn't getting much sleep.  I went to see a really good production of the play Little Foxes, but after we sat down and the curtain opened, I fell asleep.  I didn't wake up until intermission, when people started clapping.  Then I was wide awake during the intermission.  But when we sat back down and the curtain opened to Act II, I fell alseep again and didn't wake up until the play was over and everyone was clapping again.  I clapped too, but I hadn't seen a moment of the play.

If you want to have bad dreams--or see what we put our animals through--here's a link one of my students sent me.  She said it made her think of Chew On This, which we're reading for our high intermediate reading and writing class.  She's also a vegetarian.

http://vimeo.com/73234721