I think what needs to happen is that events need to be better categorized such that:
passive threats like what happend with you will allow you to pause and save
actual threats that chase you and harm you should only be able to pause your game
then again, what is happening is very circumstantial because we have holiday threats that were haphazardly thrown in without any oversight on other threats that could cause issues like this.
Hopefully a quickfix gets sent out to swap us out of holiday mode.
ps. if you cannot find the event that's messing with your sleep, you can go to a terminal and type debug (space) events to check which is active currently.
you can also use debug scrape to stop all events that are occurring (even krampus is unstoppable to the mighty scrape command)