It happened to me for the first time in my life two summers ago. And it's happened about 3 more times since then, and it is absolutely one of the best feelings in the world.
What is it, you ask? It's waking up from a sound sleep because of laughter.
The shaking of my belly and the blurt-out from my lips (that comes from a hard laugh) is precisely the thing that WAKES ME UP.
And the laughter is so uncontrollable that I roll over and simply MUST keep laughing. Sometimes it is so good that my eyes are watering and it's hard to breathe. And my belly will literally not stop shaking as I continue to think about the hilarity of that last dream. With joy, I try to stay in the moment for as long as I can, and thankfully it does not take much effort to do so. At those moments, the world is just SO FUNNY to me! And sometimes I will then get up to jot down my dream on paper.
Quite honestly, I think it's my body's way of doing something it wants to do when it hasn't been given the opportunity lately. I used to date this boy that would make me laugh hard all the time. It would be the kind of hard laughter that would stop my breathing entirely for a few moments and which--after I knew I wasn't going to die from it and all the laugher finally subsided--would then cause me to cough for 15 minutes simply because of all the phlegm it stirred up my lungs. Now THAT is a high quality, hardy laugh! And so healthy, too.
No longer having that boy in my life (which is actually a good thing) has certainly reduced the amount of near-death experiences I have had from extreme, gut-quaking laughter. And it only took the passage of one year's time before my body started to develop a laughter reflex in order to cope (not with the absence of the boy but with the absence of the laughter). Pretty cool and adaptive, huh? Looks like macro-evolution might be real. :-)
And so now I want to take a poll... Have you, dear readers, ever been woken up by your own laughter?
