How Not To Dad: Episode 3 - Night Terrors

    How Not To Dad: Episode 3 - Night Terrors

   I spent a ton of time in haunted houses in my twenties and early thirties.  It was what my friends and I did.  Around Halloween time, several local attractions would pop up in our area and we'd travel sometimes out of state to visit the most notorious of them.  We even visited real haunted locations, like Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville.  I think we all loved that constant buzz of adrenaline, that anticipation of what's going to happen next.
    Is a chainsaw-wielding clown going to pop out of the corner and chase me through the trail?
    Is that mannequin really a mannequin?
    What's tickling my leg?
    Do you hear that sound?
    Who's screaming?
    When things get quiet is when the real terror begins.  That's when someone - or some thing - is gearing up to try and scare at least a moderate-sized squirt of piss out of you.  That's when you need to be on your toes, you know?
    Fast-forward to today.  On some nights, I live in a haunted house.  The haunts in my home are unhappy children sent to bed thirsty, or babies mad that they can't sleep in bed with their mommy.
    One night last week my wife and I put our son to bed, and then carried our daughter to her little playpen bed in our room.  After Abby fell asleep, my wife and I laid down and watched a couple of episodes of The Office until we fell asleep. 
    The first phantom appeared before midnight.  A little boy, about five years old.  It touched my shoulder and I rolled over to face it while half asleep and coming out of a dream. 
    "Can I have a cup of water?" The ghost whispered. 
    I motioned towards a bottle of water on my night stand.  "Take it," I murmured.  The thought of this phantom returning to his room and peeing the bed didn't occur to me.  I just wanted my sleep back.  The ghost soon vanished.
    Ten minutes later the second ghost wailed into the night from the foot of my bed.  I jerked out of sleep, my eyes open wide.  The sound dissipated, and I started to think I had imagined it when a rustling came from the same place.  

    Then another moan.

    I laid perfectly still.  I prayed this little ghost wouldn't hear me and wake up screaming.

    After several minutes of lying there stiff as a corpse I finally began to doze again.  The movement at the foot of the bed ceased.  I sank into sleep, feeling its warm arms envelope me as I drifted further and further from consciousness.

    "Mommy!" Something called from the other room.
    My eyelids twitched open.  What time is it?

    "Mommy!"
    My stomach shriveled.  Goosebumps sprouted on my arms.  Some part of me hearkened back to those childhood fears from watching too many horror movies.  There's just something really unsettling about hearing voices shouting from somewhere in a dark house in the middle of the night.
    Even if it is your son.
    "MOMMY!"

    I look at my wife, who is shifting in our bed, half asleep.  

    I couldn't tell if I was fully awake or dreaming the sound.  The eerie sensation lingered.  My fear, though, was not of a supernatural entity waiting to harvest my soul the minute I stepped off the bed to go investigate.  My fear was a sick child.  Not only do you not want your kid to be in pain, you also don't want to be scrubbing hurl out of their bedroom carpet at 2:00 a.m. on a weeknight.
    "MOMMY!" 
    My wife's eyes are half open.
    "What is it Logan?"  She calls out.
    We've got to be careful.  The other little ghost has fallen asleep no more than six feet away.  We don't need a double haunting.
    "Come in here, Logan."  I call, hoping to somehow trick the properties of sound into allowing a shout that is also a whisper.  The delicate balance holds.  My daughter remains asleep.
    A door opens somewhere.
    Footsteps thump across the hall.
    Our bedroom door swings open, spilling light from the hallway across our bed.  A figure stands there.  "My tooth hurts."  He says.
    Nikki and I look at each other, then back at Logan.
    "Um, which one hurts?  The wiggly one?"  Nikki asks.
    "Uh-huh," he whines.  I can tell by his posture that he's half asleep.  His shoulders are slumped, and his head is hanging at an angle like he's trying to hold it up but doesn't have enough energy.  I think it hits both Nikki and I at the same moment that he's sleepwalking.  He'd gone to the dentist that day and had gotten a good report.  His tooth shouldn't be hurting.  (I never verified if he was dreaming about the dentist, but I did ask him the next day if his tooth still hurt.  "Nope." he said.)
    "Go back to bed and get to sleep, baby." Nikki tells him.  "It'll feel better in the morning."
    Logan shuffles off.  We hear his door close.
    While Nikki fell back asleep, I laid on my back staring at the ceiling.  The barrage of waking jolts kept me on edge.  I couldn't help but lay there anticipating the next jump scare.  I was like a kid trying to wait out a storm, knowing that next thunderclap is coming but not knowing when.
    An hour later I finally made it to sleepytown.  The next time I awoke it was to the wail of an alarm clock.  I roll out of bed, the events of last night now a fading memory.  My body sure as hell remembers, though.  I've become a zombie for the day, shambling through the hallways and cubicles at my workplace in voracious search not for brains but for coffee.  That sweet, delicious potion that has the ability to rouse the dead and hold the ghosts of last night at bay.
    At least until tonight.


Moral of the Story: Sleep all you can.  Sleep is good.  Sleep is life.  Sleep.  Sleep.  Sleepysleepsleep.... sleep.  zzzz...  zzzzzzzz....