Bumps in the Night
Presently my soul grew stronger, hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is, I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, taping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you.” Here I opened wide the door, —
Darkness there, and nothing more. —Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
When I was about 30, I lived alone in a house with a dog and a cat. The neighborhood wasn’t anyplace I would want to raise kids, but it was safe enough that I didn’t lose sleep over home invaders wielding shotguns or police checkpoints as an effort to eliminate the unsavory element of prostitution. In short, I slept soundly. Baby sleep.
One ordinary night after studying and reading, I laid down for slumber with sunrise only a few short hours away. As I lay drifting with my head beneath the open window and the cool night air seeping in, I was rudely awakened by SCRAAAAAAAAAAPE! across the window sill outside. I shot out of bed, alarming the dog, and glared out the window at the would-be intruder or ferocious rodent of unusual size. The same gentle breeze that had been whisking me away into la-la land was moving the branches with serene elegance. Despite the lack of moon or flood lighting, it was clear that the random motions of a tree or branch or twig against the glass created a sound that thrilled my half-conscious brain. I checked with the dog to see if he was concerned, only to find him looking longingly at me to lay back down so he could return to sleep. “Only the wind…” I told him, but perhaps said it more for myself. Only the wind…
A week later it happened again, but this time no wind. I dressed minimally, grabbed my flashlight and the noticeably unconcerned dog, and ran outback in order to catch the culprit red-handed. I hadn’t considered what I was gong to do when I found the intruder, but I followed Poe’s advise and “let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.” Needless to say, there was no intruder or beast. In fact, there was no twig or branch against the window, and apparently from the placement of the shrubbery, there never had been. But something had been there. Something woke me from sleepy twilight and scared the wits out of me. Standing in my backyard in my unmentionables with a flashlight and an unamused dog, I told myself once again that it must have been the wind. “It mustbe.”
Finally, the next week I had a witness when my girlfriend slept over. As I relaxed… BANG! outside in the still of the night. I looked over at Jane, resting but awake, and she didn’t budge.
“Didn’t you hear that?” I asked, slightly shaken.
“Hear what?”
“That bang at the window? You didn’t hear that?”
“No?” she said with a tinge of irritation. “You should get some sleep.”
But I couldn’t. It was then that I realized the source of my midnight treks into the backyard and hours of puzzled pondering. I looked out the window to confirm what I already knew. There was nothing there.
The sounds, those scrapes and bangs and bumps in the night, were all in my head, and had been as real as fireworks on the Fourth of July.
For weeks I was afraid to sleep. I was afraid of those moments of drift. I knew enough about schizophrenia to know that it often appeared out of nowhere one day and that was that – delusions and hallucinations “forever more.” I did research and study. I had to find out that I was okay, and luckily that turned out to be the case, but I learned quite a bit about the way brains operate. I learned that I was going to be okay, as long as I was prepared for the occasional unexplainable bump in the night.
Where did the sounds come from? Why was this happening at all? How common and universal was this experience? The answers turned out to be quite shocking. Over the course of time and experience, I started to consider what use these quirks and quivers of the human mind could be, particularly to the struggling writer. Those answers, coupled with a few real world examples, are what we are going to delve into over the next few blogs. We’re going to take a close look at schizophrenia, so close in fact that you may not see the way you think in quite the same way ever again. Then we’re going to dive into the mind of the sociopath, a condition which stems from everything that’s swimming around in your head right now. Finally, from the knowledge we explore together, we’ll find ways to put these anomolies to good use. The hope is that we can search out the harshest of mental deviations, only to come out on the other side with some really interesting fodder for our fictional cannons.
In the meantime, rest up. Enjoy those good nights of sleep. Listen, though, for the bumps in the night. There’s a good possibility that not all of them are really there. Sometimes there really is “darkness there, and nothing more.”
Image: Nancy Drew silhouette used with permission by Jenn Fisher of Nancy Drew Sleuth.
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