Read the transcript for the stand-up comedy special 'Sleepwalk With Me Live' (2011) by Mike Birbiglia on Comedy Buff. Track transcripts ready: 12/12.

So when I was a kid, it was this bear that would walk in the front door of my house. And as an adult, it was this jackal that would hover above my bed. Well, the sleepwalking got worse. Abby and I graduated from school and we moved to Brooklyn. We had a very small apartment, but it was comfy, you know. We had a big puffy couch and two cats. And we made our first major purchase. We bought a TiVo. And one night I had a dream that I was in the Olympics for some kind of arbitrary event like dustbustering.
And they told me that I got third place. And I stood up on the third place podium and I'm feeling pretty good about myself. I'm new to the sport, you know. Even in my dreams, I don't win, per se. In my wildest dreams, I place. And they say, they say, actually, we reconsidered and we decided that you got second place. And I move over to the second place podium and it starts wobbling. And it's wobbling and wobbling.
And I wake up and I'm falling off the top of our five-foot bookcase in our living room. And I land on the floor, hard, on top of our TiVo. I know. And it breaks into pieces. And it was like one of these stories you hear where people black out drinking and they wake up in Idaho. They don't know where they are. They're just like, oh, no. Hardee's, you know, or whatever's there. But it was in my own living room, I was just like, oh, no.
TiVo pieces. And I get up and I go back to bed and Abby wakes me up in the morning and she says, Michael, what happened to the TiVo? And I say, I got second place. And I'm really sorry. And I'm really sorry. Sometimes symptoms are not as obvious as blood and your pee. It's five years ago, and I'm in Wallo Wallo, Washington, which is a place. And I'm staying at a hotel called La Quinta Inn. Some people correct me when I say that.
They go, no, no, no, it's La Quinta. And I'm like, that's not fair. You can't force me to speak Spanish. I didn't press 2 or whatever. So, I just performed at five colleges in four days. I know that might seem strange, but there were two in one day. One of them was at lunch. They had literally placed me in front of a deli line, and they hadn't told the students there would be a show. And so I'm just kind of shouting at these strangers as they order turkey sandwiches.
And that's what a lot of these college gigs are like. When you're starting out, you know, you show up, and they kind of forget they've even invited you. They're just like, oh, yeah, so there's you, and then we have a lip-sync contest, so I don't know. Like, you could host the lip-sync contest. That happened. On that tour, I showed up at the school, and they had me hosting the lip-sync contest, which is not a format that I'm a fan of, and neither were the students.
There were only two entries. And the woman who was running the event was very upset about this, and she got up to introduce me to the crowd, and she said, "You know, we have this contest every year. And in the past, we've had 15 or 20 entries. And this year, there were two. And we don't have to have this contest if you don't want to have it, because I'm not doing this for me. I'm doing this for you."
I'm now the comedian, Mike Birbiglia. And then I had to jog up on stage like, "Hey, y'all ready to lip-sync? I can't hear you." That was my lip-sync joke. That wasn't even the worst show on that tour. One of the shows, I showed up, and they had me performing in the center of a walk-a-thon for lupus. And the guy who booked me looked me in the eye, and he goes, "I know it's not ideal." And he was right, you know, because they placed me in the center of a gymnasium.
There was an all-night walk-a-thon around the perimeter, and I had a microphone, and I had to kind of spin as people walked around me in circles. I was like an oscillating desk van blowing humor, and it was... it was not ideal. As ideal as it might sound, I can assure you that it was not. But as insane as these hell gigs sound, every night I would go back to the hotel room that the students had booked me at, and the first thing I would do, without fail, was check my email to see if any more gigs like this had come through.
Because when you're self-employed, you know, sometimes it's desperate, and your email becomes like a slot machine. And you're like, "What am I doing next week? Nothing. Refresh." That's how I found myself lying in bed at La Quinta Inn, in Wayo, Wayo, Washington. It's 1:00 a.m., and I'm completely overtired. That week, in four days, I had driven 670 miles. I'd flown in to Portland, Oregon, rented a car, and driven up to Seattle, across the state, to Kennewick, and then Walla Walla.
The night before, I'd driven through the mountains to get to the deli show that day, and then a few more hours to the show that night. And so it's 1:00 a.m., and I'm completely exhausted, but I'm not going to sleep because I'm an insomniac. And so I'm actually on my laptop in my bed. I'm eating a pizza, and I'm watching the news, and I'm on my phone all at the same time. And I fall asleep, and I have a dream that there's a guided missile headed towards my room.
And there are all these military personnel in the room with me, and I jump out of bed, and I say, "What's the plan?" Well, the only difference between this dream and any other is that I literally leapt out of my bed, because a few years before that, I started walking in my sleep. This wasn't the first time. I remember I was living with my girlfriend at the time, and I started having this recurring dream that there was a hovering, insect-like jackal in our bedroom, which is the scariest animal one's brain can conjure in my opinion.
It's a jackal that defies gravity, you know? It looked like kind of a bloated tick with fur and ferocious teeth and teeny arms, which are the scariest kind because they're unpredictable, and it was such a terrifying image that every night I would jump on our bed and strike a karate pose. I had never taken karate, but I had the books from book fair when I was a kid. And I would say, "Abby!" That was my girlfriend.
"There's a jackal in the room!" And she got so used to this that she could talk me down while remaining asleep. She said, "There's no jackal. Please go to bed." And I would say, "Are you sure?" And she would say, "Yes, Michael. There's no jackal. Please go to bed." And I would say, "Okay." And I would go to bed knowing there was a jackal. Thank you. It's five years ago, and I'm in Walla Walla, Washington.
I'm lying in bed at La Quinta Inn. I'm watching the news. I'm Googling myself, and I'm eating a pizza all at the same time. And I fall asleep and have a dream that there's a guided missile headed towards my room. And I jump out of bed, and I say, what's the plan? And they say, the missile coordinates are set specifically on you. So I decide in my dream, and as it turns out in my life, to jump out my window so as to detonate outside the window for the sake of the platoon.
In my dreams, I'm a hero. And there are two important details. One, I was on the second floor. Two, the window was closed. It was January, so I jumped through a window like the Hulk. And I say that because that's how I described it at the emergency room. It's a very difficult thing to explain when one has jumped through a window. I was like, you know the Hulk? You know how he kind of just... He just kind of jumps through stuff.
Yeah, that's like me. I have this habit of preemptively shouting when something traumatic is about to happen. Like if someone were going to come up to me after the show and punch me in the face, I would just go, ah! Thinking maybe he'd be like, this is weird. I'm out of here. I'm not punching the shouting guy. And so I jumped through the window, and I screamed, ah! And what was remarkable was that I landed on the front lawn, and I took a fall, and I got up, and I kept running.
And I'm running, and I'm slowly realizing I'm on the front lawn of La Quinta Ine, in Y-O-Y-O-Wai-Cintan, in my underwear, bleeding. And I'm like, oh, no. But in that moment, I was relieved that I hadn't been hit by the missile. I remember thinking that would have been a disaster. At least I'm still in the game. So I found myself in the ultimate moment in my life where in retrospect, I'm like, what the hell?
At the time, I'm like, I guess I'll walk to the front desk and explain what happened. Fortunately, the person working at the front desk was mildly retarded. And I say fortunately because he was completely unfazed by what had just happened. It's three in the morning. The phones are ringing off the hook from people staying at the hotel who just saw the guy jump out the window screaming. I'm bleeding in my underwear, and I say, hello.
Because you have to start somewhere. I'm staying at the hotel. I had an incident wherein I jumped out my window. I'm bleeding, and I need to go to a hospital. And I'll never forget his reaction because he just goes, all right. And I was like, that is the best possible reaction I could receive at this juncture. So I drove myself to the hospital. I didn't see any of their options. I wasn't going to knock on people's doors like, you hear that guy screaming?
That was me. I need a ride. You know, that never goes well. So I drive myself like this scene in Reservoir Dogs. I'm bleeding and shouting. I have to explain what happened three times. The receptionist, the nurse, the doctor. I'm the Hulk. I'm the Hulk. One of the guys was like, no, you're Bruce Banner. I was like, point taken, nerd. I'm lying in the hospital bed, and they've cut open my clothes, and I can see that there's glass coming out of my legs.
And it was the most pain I had ever felt because it was the physical pain of glass coming out of my legs and the emotional pain of there's glass coming out of my legs. How did I get to a point where there's glass coming out of my legs? And I'm shivering. It's January, and I kept asking for these warm blankets because I feared if I moved too much, the glass could go deeper into my legs. I remember to say to the nurse, I feel rude asking, but if the doctor could come by, that would be amazing.
I don't know what else you guys got going on, but I'm willing to put this head to head with whatever you got. Eventually, the doctor came, and he starts taking these pieces of glass out of my legs. And he points out that he's right near my femoral artery, and if I had hit that, I could have bled to death. He said, you know, you should be dead. And I said, no, you should. I zinged him because I'm a comedian.
Two hours later, he finishes putting 33 stitches in my legs, and I flew back to New York, and I did what I should have done in the first place when I saw the jackal, when I was in the Dustbuster Olympics, and when I threw a chest of drawers in front of Brad Pitt. And I went to a doctor who specializes in sleep disorders, and I was diagnosed with REM behavior disorder, and so now, when I go to bed at night, I take medication, and I'm not making this up.
I sleep in a sleeping bag up to my neck, and I wear mittens, so I can't open the sleeping bag. So literally, if I had the same dream again, it would just be like... I have to sleep. So that's the story. So that's the story. But there's one more thing. About four months after this incident happens, I go back out on the road, and the only difference is that my agent would call ahead, and he would say, "Mike has to stay on the first floor."
Inevitably, they'd ask why, and he'd cover for me. He'd be like, "Because that's what Mike Birbiglia wants!" And I would show up to these places, and the people who would just hate me, just a little bit before we met, because I was this person who had these insane requests that didn't make any sense, you know? And so I started to feel the slightest distance between me and everyone that I met, you know?
Just the slightest distance. And one night, I was booked at a college in Boston, and I drove four and a half hours from New York to Boston, and I check into my hotel before the show,