Things that go bump in the night

It was 2 a.m. and after four hours of telling Doug that I would turn off my reading lamp, “in a minute” I was finally asleep. Just barely. I was in that dream state where the concepts of flying, friends from high school, the color purple, and cows all seem to come together in a drama that involved me running around my house from a purple cow. I had just escaped from the cow when I woke up

What was that noise? I knew that I heard something. It sounded like spoons falling in the sink. Were there spoons falling in the sink in my dream? I searched my memory. No, just purple cows. I lifted my head off the pillow, listening intently through the sound of my noise machine for further noises.

I didn’t a.) turn off my sound machine, or b.) wake up Doug because if there really was an intruder in the house I don’t know want him to know I’m awake.Why? Well, first there is the element of surprise. If you can crawl out of bed and hide behind the door with a golf club you may have a chance for a crushing blow to the head when he opens the door. This is my Hollywood strategy.

Second, there is the element of escape. This is my anti-Hollywood strategy, where you do the thing that no self-respecting hero would actually do, but might save your own skin.

But I couldn’t abandon my husband and two cats to an intruder, nor did I have a golf club anywhere nearby so I continued to lie in bed, trying to breathe as quietly as possible, listening for more spoons falling in sinks. Was that a footstep? Our house creaks all the time. It’s old, and it makes noises of its own that I don’t even notice during the day but I do at night.

I wondered whether I could crawl over Doug and reach the bear spray. We have three cans for self-defense against grizzly bears, but in the entire time we’ve owned them we’ve only ever sprayed ourselves. This is why we don’t own any guns.  Pepper spray is very painful, so  Doug likes to keep one next to the bed “just in case.” This would be a good idea if he was the light sleeper in the relationship. Instead, it was me who was lying there, wondering if I could slip the safety off without alerting the intruder to the fact that I was awake and armed with pepper spray.

At that exact moment, the bedroom door swung open and my entire body levitated above the bed in shock. I was too paralyzed to scream, but it also dawned on me that there was no head in the doorway  so either our intruder was a little-person or my cat had decided to come in for a midnight snuggle. My breathing started to return to normal, and Peaches jumped up on the bed and curled up next to me.