I honestly don’t even know how to start this without sounding insane, which is probably why I’m here, because I don’t trust my own perception anymore and I need someone to tell me if I’ve completely lost it or if this is actually as disturbing as it feels. I’m 23F and my boyfriend is 23M, we’ve been together for almost a year (11 months), and a couple of months ago we moved in together. Ever since we started sleeping in the same bed, something has been happening that I can’t shake, and the more time goes on, the worse it feels.
Basically, he wakes me up when I fall asleep. Not accidentally rolling over. Not snoring. Not twitching once and stopping. He wakes me up, and then once I’m awake, he acts like he’s asleep.
He’s told me before that he has a history of sleepwalking and sleeptalking, and at first I genuinely believed him. I wanted to believe him. I needed to believe him, because the alternative feels terrifying. But the longer this has gone on, the more intentional it feels, and I don’t know how to reconcile that without feeling like I’m being gaslit.
It usually happens when I’m drifting off. That half-awake, half-asleep stage where you’re vulnerable and your guard is down. I don’t always know exactly what wakes me up, but the few times I’ve “caught” it, it’s been physical. A poke. A pinch. A shake. A hand placed somewhere it shouldn’t be. And the second I become fully conscious, it stops, and suddenly he’s completely knocked out.
Last night is what pushed me over the edge.
I was asleep, and something woke me. I don’t know what it was, but I remember opening my eyes and thinking, okay, maybe that was an accident, maybe he rolled over or twitched or something. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move much. I just tried to go back to sleep. As I started drifting again, I felt his hand resting on my thigh. That alone made me uncomfortable, but I tried to ignore it. Then, right as I was slipping back under, he shook my thigh. Not violently, but with enough force that my entire lower half moved. It wasn’t a twitch. It didn’t feel random. It scared the absolute shit out of me.
I was instantly wide awake.
And the SECOND I woke up fully, he started snoring.
He was not snoring before. At all. It was like a switch flipped. And that’s the part that really messes with my head, because how do you explain that? How do you explain that timing? It felt fake. It felt staged. It felt like he needed me to believe he was asleep the moment he knew I was conscious.
This isn’t new. Over the past couple of months, he’s shaken me awake, pinched me, poked me, touched me just enough to wake me up and then stopped. One time, when he pinched me hard enough that I fully woke up, I asked him, “Why are you pinching me?” and he responded in the fakest sleepy voice I’ve ever heard, “Pinching you?” and then immediately went still again. I didn’t even know what to say. I just froze. I felt stupid and embarrassed and crazy, like I’d accused him of something insane and now had no proof.
For background, I have PTSD and trauma from past relationships. I do NOT like sleeping around people. He knows this. When I first moved in, I told him I wanted my own room, and at the time he agreed. We weren’t even sleeping together yet when I moved in. That came later. Now, if I suggest sleeping separately, he acts like it’s the end of the world, like it means I don’t love him or trust him or want to be with him.
Because of this, I’ve started moving to the couch in the middle of the night after he wakes me up, just so I can get some rest. The thing is, he has his own room. He has his own bed. He refuses to use it. He insists on sleeping in my room, and now I feel trapped, like I can’t escape this situation without causing a massive fight.
When I bring it up, he says all the “right” things. “Why would I do that on purpose?” “What would I gain from waking you up?” “You know I want us to sleep together, why would I sabotage that?” He says I’m making him sound evil. That there’s nothing in his past behavior that suggests he’d do something like this. That he wouldn’t waste all this time and effort and money on a relationship just to ruin it over something so weird.
But here’s the thing: sleep deprivation is literally a form of torture. Gaslighting exists. And I know what my body is experiencing.
What made everything worse is that this escalated after I told him he wasn’t allowed to sleep in my room anymore. When I said it, he went completely quiet. I looked up at him, and his expression was terrifying. Blank. Intense. Unblinking. Like the Kubrick stare. It scared me so badly that my stomach dropped. A few hours later, we went back and forth for a long time with me repeatedly saying I didn’t believe it was unconscious, and him repeatedly insisting that it was.
Before the conversation ended, he said something like, “Is it really that hard to trust me? I don’t want you thinking I would do something like that.”
And now I feel like I’m spiraling.
Everything else about him has been great. Maybe too great. Like a facade. Like the kind of person who seems perfect until something cracks and you see what’s underneath. Or maybe I’m projecting. Maybe my trauma is convincing me I’m in danger when I’m not. Maybe I’m paranoid. But I also know that something feels deeply wrong.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know if I’m losing my mind or if I’m dating someone who is intentionally messing with my sleep and then making me question my reality.
Please tell me — am I crazy?