I’ve never fallen asleep during a film, and I’m very proud of that. I hold that achievement up like a diploma, waving it obnoxiously at people and pointing at myself – just in case they don’t make the connection.
That’s right: I’ve never fallen asleep during a film. Yeah. Me. Liam “Never Fallen Asleep During A Film” Maguren will never fall asleep during a film.
But when a stranger falls asleep next to you, things get problematic. You have to hope they’re still and silent, because if they’re not, there’s hardly anything you can do. Believe me – I’ve thought way too hard about this.
Snoring is bad enough, cutting off the feels you feel halfway through The Fault in Our Stars by the sound of a pregnant walrus. The snorer is the one who fears this the most – that is, if they’re unfortunate enough to realise it.
Then you’ve got the ‘nodders’, the brave soldiers constantly battling fatigue in a tug-of-war against gravity. It’s like sitting next to a giant closed fist waving back and forth – it’s mega-distracting.
But it’s not like you can tell a sleeping person to stop sleeping. It’s not like that person WANTS to fall asleep or that they have any control over the sleeping. So scolding them kinda just makes YOU the jerk.
You also can’t assume their irresponsible for entering a film tired. Perhaps some do, but most of the time, you’ll find a sleeper’s exhaustion hits them like a baseball bat to the head. Sometimes, a busy day catches up with you in a cinema. Sometimes, the theatre chair and room temperature are just too damn cosy. Sometime, a poor fellow hits the peak of a chart-topping hangover. There are so many variables that make cinema sleeping so unpredictable.
The simplest response is to nudge them on the arm – stranger danger be damned – and wake them up. But that’s risky business, opening the cage of an unknown animal. Sure, you may get a llama of a response, where the stranger just looks around groggily for a bit before focusing on the screen. But they might also burst out of a nightmare with the energy of a frightened spider monkey.
You cannot know. You can never know. But I can give you some advice: if you are brave enough to wake a sleeping stranger, pick the right moment during a movie. God have mercy on the person who wakes up to the image of THAT whipping scene in 12 Years a Slave…
