A Beast in the Night

I had this dream last night. I often don’t remem­ber my dreams, but this one is still quite vivid to me. In it I was lying on the grass, enjoy­ing the blue sky when all of a sud­den I was being kicked. I remem­ber sev­eral thoughts run­ning through my head in a flash. What would any­one ever have against me to attack­ing me so vio­lently? I was not in anyone’s back­yard, I was on pub­lic land. What had I done to upset this per­son to such an obvi­ously high level of frus­tra­tion? I felt myself start­ing to wake up from the dream. Instead of men­tally grasp­ing at the wisps of the dream, not want­ing to let them go like I usu­ally do, I eagerly scur­ried along the path towards consciousness.

Some­thing was a miss, though. I thought I was awake, but I could still feel the kick­ing against my leg and side. Had I woken up in my dream (ever had one of those weird expe­ri­ences, when you wake up, but only in the dream?) I was then struck with fear as a ques­tion popped into my head: Had I actu­ally been awake this whole time and the dream­ing was actu­ally a day dream? Was every­thing real except the part of me being asleep? “Oh no, the vicodin is play­ing an evil trick on me!”, I thought. ”

As I felt myself open my eyes, and blink, and blink again, I real­ized I was look­ing at a dark room. For real. Phew. But there it was still. That kick­ing. Just when I thought I had fig­ured every­thing out, I was once again con­fused as to what was real and what wasn’t. Then it hit me. Again. My wife’s leg. I was sure this time that it was my wife’s leg. I turned to her, my love, with a hor­ri­fied look of bewil­der­ment. The attacker in the night was real, and it was my wife?!

The look on my wife’s face mir­rored the anger I felt swelling inside of me. She looked like she had been rehears­ing for a scene in Hal­loween, and didn’t need any more prac­tice. Eyes glar­ing red in the moon­light, burn­ing my skull like laser beams. “What?”, I squeaked out. What had I done to deserve such fierce treat­ment? I think I must have blanked out from fear just then because I don’t remem­ber any­thing else. Or per­haps I innately knew that no man can recover from such scorn, so best to block out any mem­ory of my transgressions.

As I woke up this morn­ing, sun stream­ing through the blinds, I won­dered if per­haps every­thing that I recalled had been just a cruel dream. I felt like shit, though, as if I had been run over by a car (and not one of those lit­tle toy cars like the Mini or Smart cars). As I hob­bled into the kitchen like a zom­bie in need of cof­fee (hmm, maybe I could be in a Hal­loween movie, too), I ran into my wife. I felt my body flinch, my mus­cles sud­denly recall­ing the abuse from the night and mak­ing every effort to recoil away. My need for cof­fee was stronger than my fear, though, so I con­tin­ued. She was unload­ing the dish­washer as I began to fill the ket­tle with water in prepa­ra­tion for some fresh French press cof­fee. The first thing she said to me was, “Oh, the things you were doing last night!”

I asked her what had hap­pened, half not want­ing to hear her answer. She launched into an expla­na­tion that included sounds I have never heard before (and I’ve watched Lord of the Rings). I will attempt to explain the sounds to you in let­ters but you’ll have to use your imag­i­na­tion to get the rest of the effect. “UrrgaaHHH SHnorkggggg ahhch­gorschtkkkk!!” It turns out that my full face mask that I wear with my CPAP machine (to keep me from stop­ping breath­ing by push­ing air at a high pres­sure down my nose and mouth) pushes my face in unusual ways mak­ing me pro­duce some incred­i­bly loud and dis­turb­ing sounds. Appar­ently, I sound like a beast about to kill its prey.

My wife began to get worked up again, like a sleep deprived per­son would after hav­ing to sleep with a beast like me. She con­tin­ued mak­ing the hor­ri­ble sounds as she picked up our 9 inch knife from the dish­washer. “Oh no,” I thought. “This is it! And I haven’t even changed my underwear!”