My 19 year old daughter's voice came loud over the intercom "MOM! Something's wrong! I Can't get up!"
Her bedroom was a building adjacent to our house. It was about 6am early spring 2008. We live in the Sierra foothills of California, wooded, beautiful, and full of wildlife. I ran out to her room and let myself in. She needed help sitting up and complained of intense back pain. As I helped pull her up I noticed that she had sticks and leaves in her hair. I pointed that out and asked "What were you doing last night?" She looked around and behind herself to the bed where dirt and leaves lay where she had slept. Confused and in great pain she could only recount of a dream that she'd had that night.
She stated that in the dream she heard something outside of her door and opened it to find a large mountain lion standing not far away. She slipped on her shoes and stepped outside to approach it and it started to run, so she started to chase it. She ran after it into the woods and slid down one of the giant boulders onto a large rock below, falling about 8 feet straight onto her lower back. She said then she remembered 'swimming' in the leaves and sticks for a while on her belly, then woke up in her bed.
Normally a dream such as this would not alarm me, but my daughter used to sleep-walk quite a bit when she was younger, once getting up in the middle of the night and losing all of her bed linens. It was only through recounting her 'dream' that we were able to find the missing linens folded and put away in the closet.-Yes, she has done that in her sleep.
On this particular morning though, there was clear evidence that my daughter had been outside and in the woods. A knock at the door was my 14 year old son who had been up to the barn to feed the animals. When I asked him what he wanted he said "Mom you might want to see this, I think we had a mountain lion last night" and he pointed to a spot on the dirt driveway about 20 feet from the door.
Sure enough, clear prints from a large lion crossed the yard and went into the woods. Mountain lions have frequented our property many times over the years, and my Mom, who lived on the property as well, used to be quite the game tracker in her hunting days. My dad works for State Fish and Game, so there was no question about the prints.
I took my daughter to her doctor and she would later have surgery to repair a crushed disk in her back. She also now locks her door at night, to keep herself from chasing any more lions in her sleep.