I opened my
eyes. I looked around after the initial
realisation that I was once again, indeed, awake. This wasn't my
room....
Nor was it any room in which I had ever woken up before, at any point in my previous(and successful, might I add) 12 years of life. Then I knew where I was: this was the ground-floor bathroom of my grandparents house, and I was in some fairly annoyingly cold water in the tub.
After emerging and drying off, I wrapped a towel round my waist and exited the bathroom. As I walked to my room to get some proper sleep, I bumped into my early-bird grandfather, awake at 7a.m. as usual.
"Pete! he said, showing his confusion at seeing me awake. "What are you doing?" I explained that I had fallen asleep in the tub last night, and how I was going straight back to sleep but this time in a dryer environment. He chuckled, I went to bed.
When I woke up, hours later, I went to get some breakfast. In the kitchen were my grandparents, and my grandmother verified, straight away, the information which she had heard from my grandfather (news travels fast, eh?).
"Yeah, I fell asleep in the tub, but it wasn't that bad actually. Kinda nice at first, before it got colder.."
"WELL!" said my grandmother. "We have to do something about this."
"No really, I got plenty of sleep afterwards, and I'm perfectly awake."
My grandmother interrupted. "No, no. This is not okay with me. YOU COULD HAVE DROWNED!!!"
My jaw dropped to the floor like a brick. "Eh?" I said.
"You could have drowned!!" my grandparents said together.
"......How, exactly?"
They burst into individual on-goings about how if I had slipped under the water level then I wouldn't have been able to breathe.
I was amazed that they didn't think I would wake up if I started to drown.
Don't they think I would notice? I mean, when my brother comes into my room I wake up. When their cat jumps on my bed I wake up. When I need a piss I wake up. Surely I would wake up if I needed to breathe?
No, they didn't see it that way. I was banned from taking baths after 10:00 at night. We even called my father to get his opinion, and he agreed with me. He told his parents that he had enough confidence in me to wake up when deprived of oxygen. But that didn't free me of the 10:00 rule.
I mean, sure, if I had been under the influence of something or other then yeah, I might not catch on. But I was 12 and innocent. And yeah, like my Dad said, there was worry about the rapid change of body temperature as the water cooled down, and someone said that there's a danger of water getting in the lungs, but I swim and stuff, and nothing like that has ever happened yet.
To this day I still have to take showers instead of baths in my grandparents' house after 10:00. Personally, I know many more cases of people slipping in the shower and cracking their heads than people drowning in the bath.