I don’t know about you, but when I hear a bump in the night, my heart starts to pound because I know there’s an axe murderer in the house and he’s tiptoeing through the living room ever so slowly even though his bumping into something gave himself away. Axe murderers are so committed to slowly creeping that they will continue to do it for hours even when you know they’re there.

What I should do when this happens is get out of bed, turn on all the lights and search every room in the house, then shut all the lights off again and go back to bed. It’s like hitting the reset button. Puts my thoughts at ease, settles my beating heart, everything’s right with the world again.

Do I do that? Sometimes I do, even though I feel silly about doing it. Not always, though. I have to feel more silly about laying in bed worrying about the axe murderer that isn’t there than I do about searching the house for him. I didn’t reach that tipping point night before last. Heard the bump, then laid there for the next five or ten minutes listening for the next bump that would tell me whether or not the axe murderer had  v e r y   s l o w l y  crept as far as the hallway. Heard only my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest.

Then the clock in the front room struck midnight. I’m not much freaked out by the witching hour any more, just imaginary axe murderers, so the chiming clock was significant only because it made me realize that if I didn’t get a grip on myself, I was facing another six hours of lying awake in bed listening for footfalls that weren’t there.

I knew what to do. The dumb thing is, I didn’t do it. Instead, I went to the bathroom and sat there long enough for my heart to stop pounding, then shuffled off back to bed, thinking happy thoughts.

And it might have worked if my heart hadn’t done a flip-flop as I was drifting off to sleep. It was probably doing nothing more out of the ordinary than shifting gears. I mean, it had been going flat-out for ten minutes, fueled by an adrenaline rush. Then I got out of bed, forcing it to gear up so it could pump blood through a vertical circ system, and then I laid back down again and asked it to ratchet all the way back down into sleep mode. When asked to do all that inside of fifteen minutes, why wouldn’t it backfire at least once?

But because I was somewhere between sleeping and wakefulness, and because I’d just been wrapped up in a paranoid delusion about being stalked by an axe murderer, I naturally assumed I was having a heart attack, even though there were no other signs: I was not clutching at my chest; my left arm was not numb, paralyzed or rigidly locked against the side of my body; I wasn’t trying to say “help” through clenched teeth. This began to set me at ease until I remembered these were all warning signs I’d seen in movies, so I had to consider: Were they actual warning signs, or were they “based on” warning signs that were amped up for dramatic effect? Maybe my body was crawling with warning signs that never made it to the final cut of the movie because they were boring, even if they were critically important to the final diagnosis.

And so on until morning. I should have searched the house when I had the chance.

Zombified by lack of sleep, I shambled through the work day which, thankfully, took place almost entirely at my desk. I had just one meeting with my supervisor in the morning and I’m not saying I got away with not being one-hundred percent there, but I’m pretty sure I answered all the questions.

After we got home that evening I even stayed up long enough to watch an excellent video of Richard The Second (part of a series called The Hollow Crown; we were so impressed by the first part that we bought the whole series) before crawling off to bed.

I was almost too tired to fall asleep; all my muscles were tingling and jittery from being on autopilot all day and I felt a bit light-headed, but it couldn’t have lasted too long because I don’t remember anything after that until the cat woke me up around five in the morning to beg for the kibble I’d forgotten to put out for her before I hit the hay. After taking care of that, I slept until almost eight o’clock.

Feel a little better now. Probably still stretch out on the recliner this afternoon to rest my eyes for a half-hour or so, though.