Monday, August 16, 2010

Bedtime Fears Part 1

I am afraid of many things.

Some things are rational fears - being in a horrible accident/fire/hostage situation.
Other fears are not so rational.
Many of these irrational fears can be found at bed time...

Growing up I wanted a bunk bed, as many children do.
My Dad gave me one when I was around 8 or so.
I was so excited, at last, an adventure bed! You could do flips off of it, climb around, and most defintely hit your head on the ceiling. What a fun bed!




(Before I continue, there's something you should know about me. At any point and for no reason, something will occur to my brain. A quick 'oh, what if...!' or 'I bet this...' and something fun can quickly turn into something awful.)

So the bunk bed was the absolute best! I was having such a fun time with this giant sleep toy!

Then it suddenly occured to me that someone could stab me while I was sleeping in the top bunk, through the mattress. My adult brain now realizes that no knife could have reached through there. To stab me through the mattress, someone would have to be wielding a sword.
But this logic did not enter my child brain.
I was to lie awake many nights, worried that my life would come to a sudden end by some prowler who could easily sneak under me without my knowledge and start stabbing away.





This fear multiplied when I had a friend stay over. I knew they were down there.
What if they suddenly turned murderous?

I soon took to sleeping on the lower bunk.

Since my parents were divorced and I did not have a bunk bed at my Mom's, you might think that my sleep was free of worry there.
It was not.

At my Mom's house I would sleep with my bedroom door open a crack so that the hallway light would slightly illuminate my room (fear of the dark).
One night, as I gazed at the crack in the door, pleased to have the light flooding in, it occured to me that a man might be standing in the hallway (always wearing a hat for some reason).





This feeling was exacerbated by the fact that I do not have 20/20 vision.
Sure that could be a shadow in the hall from the nearby laundry room, but through all the squiggly blur, it could also be the man, backlit by the hallway light.

I could get up and see, but then the man would know that I knew.
Maybe the only reason he wasn't coming in was because he just wanted to watch but if I got up he would surely become violent and possibly stab me.





I solved this problem many nights later (I kept forgetting about the man until I was already in bed) by sleeping with my door closed and the tv on.
This only produced a whole new series of bed time fears...

3 comments:

  1. This blog is terrible. I will continue reading it so I might understand further why it is so awful. I hate this blog. I will read it very often. Shut up. No. Ok. I won. No you didn't.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Captain, I would respond angrily to what you have written, however I do not want to anger a bear. Especially one wearing a hat.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That explains when I gave the bunkbed away to a friend I noticed some knife marks on the bottom of the mattress. Dad.

    ReplyDelete