It’s night. Lights are off. You’re in bed, about to doze off, when you hear a … creak. What was that?
Sometimes the creaking sound at night can be an intruder who will break our knees with a bat. Sometimes it’s a visitor from the land of the undead who will crawl into our bed and eat our face.
It’s never just the sound of furniture setting, is it? Or something from outside that has no greater cause than the wind or a rat? Our ever-so rational minds never go for the easy and most likely option. It loves to scare us. Loves to make us see things and hear things that aren’t there, but that make us feel like we’re down to the last few minutes of our life.
I wonder why I can watch a lot of gory films during the day but get startled by the wind at night? My brain knows that nothing cataclysmic happens to people who stay alone (mostly) and no one I know has been found mysteriously crucified in the morning. In fact, I myself have lived alone for many years of my live and survived to speak of it. So why am I still so rattled?
Something I realised a couple of days back seemed to get me closer to the answer. It’s not really an answer, to be honest, more of an explanation.
Let me start by telling you what kind of person I am during the day. When a motor engine backfires loudly, my soul often leaves my body. When a dog barks in the distance I imagine bloody murder going down. When someone fires off a cracker I jump and curse, only to jump and curse yet again when another one goes off, and then again, and again, never settling down to the surprise. For the longest time I used to imagine that unknown numbers calling me were thugs who knew my address and who I may have accidentally bumped up against during my commute.
In short, I am a tangle of nerves no matter what time it is.
I attribute a lot of this to the fact that I was a pretty soft-natured boy growing up in a pretty hard-natured city. I wasn’t born there. I moved there just as I entered my teens, i.e. a very formative time. Everything was a shock to my system, from the way people spoke, to the quick jumps to violence, to the thuggish competitiveness over girls. I have actually been mugged on the street when I was 16 and nobody came to help me.
I wouldn’t wish that life upon anyone, but I myself had no option to swim through those shark-infested waters.
As a result of that I have an overactive imagination. One that can foresee dire consequences to the most innocuous event. Final Destination has nothing on me.
Maybe this is a defence mechanism. Look ten steps into the future to protect myself. Maybe it is some kind of PTSD. Maybe it’s just my composition. My body reacts to changes in the weather quite instantaneously. Injections feel like stabbings. A creak is as good as a crack.
Now, as I said earlier, this doesn’t help me feel less anxious at night. But, what it does tell me is that I need to fight my daytime demons if I want to get nights of cosy sleep. I need to stop anticipating the worst when I get a call from an unknown number if I want to feel less doom-and-gloom if someone rings my doorbell at night.
I dislike all intrusions, whether in the form of a person, of unwanted work, a startling noise — everything feels like it is forcing itself on me without my consent. And that’s where I need to start making some changes. I need to make my metaphorical suspension stronger so I can ride over life’s bumps and potholes without much damage. The better I can manage that the better I can watch or read fictional horror and know that it doesn’t apply to my life.
Nobody’s watching me as I sleep if I watch over myself when I’m awake.