a lensless life
Jan. 10th, 2005 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7man, someday i want my eyes fixed.
I woke, and squinted at the clock, and squinted and squinted. Eleven, I thought. Good heavens, that's late, I thought. Well, I needed the sleep. I slept a little longer, and then arose, thinking that I had heard the clock in the kitchen making the noises that suggested it was noon.
To find that it was ten after ten.
Sigh. So much for my monster sleep-in.
I slept well; Dave's coughing was at a minimum. desiring a snuggle, I went and slept in his bed. I snuggled his giant stuffed monkey, and that's as far as that went. (My romantic life is crazy. You all are jealous.)
But at four AM a huge gust of wind shook the house, rattled the windows, and woke us both.
Bugger, I thought, what was that? And I peered around the room, and heard Dave turn over. Just the wind, I thought. Time to go back to sleep.
...
Of course I couldn't.
And then I remembered how I spent the earlier half of my shift at the Club Nobody Comes Here, before any living soul came into the club. (The place was empty until like seven, I swear.)
1) Watched an ancient episode of X-files in which Scully has pre-2000 hair, and Mulder goes to Puerto Rico and inexplicably some aliens come in (bad, bad special effects) and scare Jose to death and then... leave Mulder alone. Inexplicably.
2) Started watching whatever came on afterward, which was some pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo about After-Death Communications.
3) Discussed with one of the ticket-counter ladies in the club her own experiences with After-Death Communications and the paranormal.
#3 was really not what you'd think.
"Huh," I said. "The tv says that 20% of Americans have had a communication from Beyond The Grave."
"Oh yeah," Tracey said. "I have."
I don't know her well, so I didn't know if she was serious. "Is that so," I said, carefully neutral.
"Oh yeah," Tracey said. "My mother-in-law talks to me all the time. It creeps me out."
So apparently her husband's mother comes to her in dreams, that aren't dreams because it's just the dead woman and blackness, and tells her things. Like: "Tell your husband his sister is going to get in trouble if he doesn't call Dad and warn him." And, later, "You tell him I told him so!!" And the such.
"Creepy," I said.
"Annoying," she answered. "She never comes to anybody else. Just me."
She also, fairly recently, had a dream in which her dead grandmother instant-messaged her to tell her that everything was fine and she shouldn't worry. "Mom," she said, when she next saw her mother, "Gram says hi." "Oh, that's nice," her mom answered, and then paused. "Yeah," Tracey said. "I know."
And then she had a sort of creepy, sort of just funny Alien Abduction experience.
But, for me, thinking of this story at 4 am after my whole house had just shaken, it was mostly just creepy. And as I lay there with the blankets pulled up to my nose, I thought, "I am so glad that I am already in Dave's bed, so that I don't have to get up and run frantically through the house to come dive into it. This way, he never needs to know what a little twit I am." Because, and my very-sound, 4 am reasoning ran thus: You never really hear of the creepy ghost or alien stories happening to people when they're with someone else. Particularly not when they're with someone as thoroughly cynical and relatively un-gullible as Dave. I'd wake him up and be like, "Augh! Aliens or ghosts or something creepy!" and he'd sit up, grumpily, look over at the whatever-intruder, and say, "No they're not. Lemme sleep."
(Though this is the man who screamed like a girl when I showed up once at 5 am without calling first. But, he insists he knew it was me, he was just startled. Still. Anyone would scream in that kind of situation.)
Anyhow. I'll tell Tracey's Creepy Story now, behind a cut because this is all probably getting a little long.
"I was sleeping over at a girlfriend's house," Tracey began. She described the room where she was sleeping: two beds, with a space between, and at the end of the room, a desk with a clock-radio on it. It was in an old house, and the room was almost entirely surrounded in windows. "I woke up in the middle of the night, because there was a bright light shining on my upper body. The blinds were all open, which I thought was very strange indeed. I must be dreaming, I thought. I could see the outlines of the trees in the windows. And then, you know how when someone moves between you and a radio, the sound gets quieter and then louder again? I looked over at the radio, but I couldn't really see it, because without my glasses on I'm pretty much blind." She gestured to her wide, mascara'd eyes-- encased in contacts, apparently-- and I nodded.
"And then there was this silhouette, between me and the window. I couldn't really see a thing, just the outline of a person-- but the head was much larger than it should have been. Oh God, I thought, this had better be a dream, and pulled the blankets up to my nose and closed my eyes and thought go away! go away! go away!" (She mimed pulling up the blankets and scrunching up her face in total terror.
"A little while later I opened my eyes again, and the blinds were closed and the room was dark again. Holy crap, I thought, what a stupid scary dream, and I fumbled around and found my glasses and looked around. The clock-radio said 3 am, and there was nothing changed about the room. So I went back to sleep. The next morning I went down to breakfast and told the story." She described how she was sitting, next to her girlfriend, and the girl's mother was cooking breakfast.
"I said, how I woke up and the blinds were open and it was light, and I felt like there was someone in the room, and I couldn't really see but it looked like one of those bubble-head aliens from TV, and how silly it all was and how I shouldn't watch so much TV. And then I mentioned that I finally put on my glasses and it was 3:00... and the mother stopped what she was doing, and turned slowly around. 'Three?' she asked. 'Yes,' I answered, wondering why she was looking at me like that."
And then Tracey made the wide-eyed face that lets scary-story listeners know that the creeeepy punchline is approaching.
"'Last night at quarter to three,' the mother said, pale-faced, 'the dog went crazy trying to get out of my room.' She slept in a bedroom on the other side of the house. 'The dog was just going nuts, like there was an intruder in the house.'"
Tracey laughed. "And so of course I was like, Aaaaaauuuuughhh!!!"
"Auuuggghhhh!!" I answered, "creeepy!"
"Totally," she laughed. "So that's my creepy alien-abduction story. It kind of explains a lot. But I wish I knew why aliens and dead people and ghosts and such keep coming to me. It's really annoying."
And now here's a bonus Scary-Things-Happening-To-Tracey story.
"Oh," she said, "it's not always dreams, with my mother-in-law. Once, about two months after she died... No, it couldn't have been even that long. About two weeks, I think. My son was only about four months old, and he was fussing in the middle of the night, so I had gone and was holding him against my shoulder, you know, soothing him. The door was just behind my shoulder, over there," and she positioned herself and gestured so that the door to the break room was about three feet behind her, just over her shoulder, "so that if the baby were to look, he would be looking at the door." She pantomimed holding a small baby up against her chest with the baby's head at her shoulder.
"He was falling asleep, all limp-- you know how limp babies can get, and his arm was lying on my arm about here," she gestured. "When suddenly his arm raised up-- but not as if he'd lifted it himself. The hand was still limp, hanging off the wrist. It was like someone was lifting his arm, holding his hand. I stood very still and all the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I thought oh my God I can't turn and look, I can't deal with this, and then the baby woke and raised his head. He was looking over my shoulder, at that open door. I looked at his face because I just could not turn my head and see whatever was there. And you know, he just got the most peaceful smile on his face, and put his head back down on my shoulder." She laughed. "Meantime I'm freaking out, and finally I actually said, out loud, 'Please, please go away now, I can't deal with this right now, and you're scaring me.' And the baby's hand went down, very gently, as though someone had laid it back down against my arm, and the sense of someone being there faded, and when I finally turned around, there was nobody there but the dark hallway."
"Creepy," I said.
"I know," she said. "I think I kind of prefer it when she comes to me when I'm asleep."
I woke, and squinted at the clock, and squinted and squinted. Eleven, I thought. Good heavens, that's late, I thought. Well, I needed the sleep. I slept a little longer, and then arose, thinking that I had heard the clock in the kitchen making the noises that suggested it was noon.
To find that it was ten after ten.
Sigh. So much for my monster sleep-in.
I slept well; Dave's coughing was at a minimum. desiring a snuggle, I went and slept in his bed. I snuggled his giant stuffed monkey, and that's as far as that went. (My romantic life is crazy. You all are jealous.)
But at four AM a huge gust of wind shook the house, rattled the windows, and woke us both.
Bugger, I thought, what was that? And I peered around the room, and heard Dave turn over. Just the wind, I thought. Time to go back to sleep.
...
Of course I couldn't.
And then I remembered how I spent the earlier half of my shift at the Club Nobody Comes Here, before any living soul came into the club. (The place was empty until like seven, I swear.)
1) Watched an ancient episode of X-files in which Scully has pre-2000 hair, and Mulder goes to Puerto Rico and inexplicably some aliens come in (bad, bad special effects) and scare Jose to death and then... leave Mulder alone. Inexplicably.
2) Started watching whatever came on afterward, which was some pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo about After-Death Communications.
3) Discussed with one of the ticket-counter ladies in the club her own experiences with After-Death Communications and the paranormal.
#3 was really not what you'd think.
"Huh," I said. "The tv says that 20% of Americans have had a communication from Beyond The Grave."
"Oh yeah," Tracey said. "I have."
I don't know her well, so I didn't know if she was serious. "Is that so," I said, carefully neutral.
"Oh yeah," Tracey said. "My mother-in-law talks to me all the time. It creeps me out."
So apparently her husband's mother comes to her in dreams, that aren't dreams because it's just the dead woman and blackness, and tells her things. Like: "Tell your husband his sister is going to get in trouble if he doesn't call Dad and warn him." And, later, "You tell him I told him so!!" And the such.
"Creepy," I said.
"Annoying," she answered. "She never comes to anybody else. Just me."
She also, fairly recently, had a dream in which her dead grandmother instant-messaged her to tell her that everything was fine and she shouldn't worry. "Mom," she said, when she next saw her mother, "Gram says hi." "Oh, that's nice," her mom answered, and then paused. "Yeah," Tracey said. "I know."
And then she had a sort of creepy, sort of just funny Alien Abduction experience.
But, for me, thinking of this story at 4 am after my whole house had just shaken, it was mostly just creepy. And as I lay there with the blankets pulled up to my nose, I thought, "I am so glad that I am already in Dave's bed, so that I don't have to get up and run frantically through the house to come dive into it. This way, he never needs to know what a little twit I am." Because, and my very-sound, 4 am reasoning ran thus: You never really hear of the creepy ghost or alien stories happening to people when they're with someone else. Particularly not when they're with someone as thoroughly cynical and relatively un-gullible as Dave. I'd wake him up and be like, "Augh! Aliens or ghosts or something creepy!" and he'd sit up, grumpily, look over at the whatever-intruder, and say, "No they're not. Lemme sleep."
(Though this is the man who screamed like a girl when I showed up once at 5 am without calling first. But, he insists he knew it was me, he was just startled. Still. Anyone would scream in that kind of situation.)
Anyhow. I'll tell Tracey's Creepy Story now, behind a cut because this is all probably getting a little long.
"I was sleeping over at a girlfriend's house," Tracey began. She described the room where she was sleeping: two beds, with a space between, and at the end of the room, a desk with a clock-radio on it. It was in an old house, and the room was almost entirely surrounded in windows. "I woke up in the middle of the night, because there was a bright light shining on my upper body. The blinds were all open, which I thought was very strange indeed. I must be dreaming, I thought. I could see the outlines of the trees in the windows. And then, you know how when someone moves between you and a radio, the sound gets quieter and then louder again? I looked over at the radio, but I couldn't really see it, because without my glasses on I'm pretty much blind." She gestured to her wide, mascara'd eyes-- encased in contacts, apparently-- and I nodded.
"And then there was this silhouette, between me and the window. I couldn't really see a thing, just the outline of a person-- but the head was much larger than it should have been. Oh God, I thought, this had better be a dream, and pulled the blankets up to my nose and closed my eyes and thought go away! go away! go away!" (She mimed pulling up the blankets and scrunching up her face in total terror.
"A little while later I opened my eyes again, and the blinds were closed and the room was dark again. Holy crap, I thought, what a stupid scary dream, and I fumbled around and found my glasses and looked around. The clock-radio said 3 am, and there was nothing changed about the room. So I went back to sleep. The next morning I went down to breakfast and told the story." She described how she was sitting, next to her girlfriend, and the girl's mother was cooking breakfast.
"I said, how I woke up and the blinds were open and it was light, and I felt like there was someone in the room, and I couldn't really see but it looked like one of those bubble-head aliens from TV, and how silly it all was and how I shouldn't watch so much TV. And then I mentioned that I finally put on my glasses and it was 3:00... and the mother stopped what she was doing, and turned slowly around. 'Three?' she asked. 'Yes,' I answered, wondering why she was looking at me like that."
And then Tracey made the wide-eyed face that lets scary-story listeners know that the creeeepy punchline is approaching.
"'Last night at quarter to three,' the mother said, pale-faced, 'the dog went crazy trying to get out of my room.' She slept in a bedroom on the other side of the house. 'The dog was just going nuts, like there was an intruder in the house.'"
Tracey laughed. "And so of course I was like, Aaaaaauuuuughhh!!!"
"Auuuggghhhh!!" I answered, "creeepy!"
"Totally," she laughed. "So that's my creepy alien-abduction story. It kind of explains a lot. But I wish I knew why aliens and dead people and ghosts and such keep coming to me. It's really annoying."
And now here's a bonus Scary-Things-Happening-To-Tracey story.
"Oh," she said, "it's not always dreams, with my mother-in-law. Once, about two months after she died... No, it couldn't have been even that long. About two weeks, I think. My son was only about four months old, and he was fussing in the middle of the night, so I had gone and was holding him against my shoulder, you know, soothing him. The door was just behind my shoulder, over there," and she positioned herself and gestured so that the door to the break room was about three feet behind her, just over her shoulder, "so that if the baby were to look, he would be looking at the door." She pantomimed holding a small baby up against her chest with the baby's head at her shoulder.
"He was falling asleep, all limp-- you know how limp babies can get, and his arm was lying on my arm about here," she gestured. "When suddenly his arm raised up-- but not as if he'd lifted it himself. The hand was still limp, hanging off the wrist. It was like someone was lifting his arm, holding his hand. I stood very still and all the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I thought oh my God I can't turn and look, I can't deal with this, and then the baby woke and raised his head. He was looking over my shoulder, at that open door. I looked at his face because I just could not turn my head and see whatever was there. And you know, he just got the most peaceful smile on his face, and put his head back down on my shoulder." She laughed. "Meantime I'm freaking out, and finally I actually said, out loud, 'Please, please go away now, I can't deal with this right now, and you're scaring me.' And the baby's hand went down, very gently, as though someone had laid it back down against my arm, and the sense of someone being there faded, and when I finally turned around, there was nobody there but the dark hallway."
"Creepy," I said.
"I know," she said. "I think I kind of prefer it when she comes to me when I'm asleep."
