[toast0]

With the three cats I've had living with me, the closest I've come to getting my face attacked while sleeping was sometimes they walk over me, which is fine when they walk over my legs or torso, and uncomfortable when they walk over my groin or face. Usually there's some amount of motion or noise so I can get my arms up to protect my face or at least move the cat.

I haven't had the types of cats that just attack their owners with no provocation though. All three did have the thing where sometimes they get upset by something that is impercetible to humans and swat at apparently nothing and then run away. That's not usually too stealthy though, and you can usually avoid getting attacked in the face.

[bradknowles]

Of all the cats I've known over the decades, I've only ever known one that would curl up on top of someone's face while that person was sleeping (not my cat). That cat did cause quite a bit of trauma on multiple occasions, but I believe my friends found a solution for that. At certain times, I believe that my friend was woken up by his wife struggling to breathe, and so he picked up the cat and tossed it across the room. Do that a few times, and I think the cat tends to learn.

Of the cats I've actually had myself, only one of them has ever shown any interest in attacking anything related to our faces. It was actually rather terrifying to see the look on her face when she was a tiny kitten, and she spotted her reflection in our eyeballs for the first time. This was clearly a toy she needed to play with. But those damn glasses were in the way, so she had to try to bite them and pull them off. It took us a while, but we discovered that she didn't like puffs of air being blown into her face, so we used that technique to disabuse her of any notion of that kind.

We don't allow the current crop to sleep with us at night, but that was more because as kittens they needed to get used to the new room and the new house after we adopted them, and we have too much junk on the floor of our master bedroom, and we didn't want them climbing under the bed and getting covered in dust bunnies, or maybe peeing on the stuff on the floor, or whatever. These are our first cats we've ever had that we have not allowed to sleep with us at night.

Frankly, the problem of cats sleeping on our face or attacking our face is just not a problem we've ever really had to deal with, over the many different cats we've had over the decades.