kinemortophobia

i am not a scary movie fan. why, you ask? well let me tell you...
i have always had a fairly sensitive startle reflex. i am pretty gullible and am easily snuck up on. i jump and startle at everything. when i was a kid, my prankster father took full advantage of this. my sister and i spent hours in the bathroom at night when we were supposed to be getting ready for bed (what were we doing? practicing our Crest toothpaste commercials, of course). dad would crawl around on the floor and creep into the bathroom while we weren't paying attention and then jump and yell and bang on the floor mid-commercial. he never failed in sneaking up on us and we freaked out every time. it was hilarious and is one of my favorite memories. unfortunately, it also slightly traumatized me. i also have a pretty healthy imagination, so scary + my imagination = i can't sleep and irrational fear takes over.

simple solution, right? don't watch scary movies! but i love suspense and mystery, so sometimes i deal with the scary in order to just get the suspense (yes, scary and suspenseful are two very different things. trust me on this.) sometimes though, i misjudge. like last night. i had taken two excedrin for a headache and couldn't sleep (p.s. caffeine plus irrational fear is not a good combo). a friend of mine had told me about a new series on AMC called "the walking dead". i should have known. i watched the pilot episode this morning at 1 a.m. in the dark all by myself. it was, by all accounts, a very good scary show. it's about zombies but i thought it was supposed to be a documentary although apparently you can't do a documentary about something that doesn't exist so it's more like a movie...a really scary movie...i don't know...all i can say is that i couldn't turn it off, but i was curled up into a knot on the corner of my couch with my hand over my face and partially covering my eyes through the majority of it. my friend had told me she "shuddered and cried" at various places. i managed not to cry, but i did a fair amount of talking to the screen ("no, no, no!!" "he's not dead, he's not dead!!" "oh my goodness, no, no!"...you get the idea).

afterwards, i double-checked that all the doors were locked and actually leaped into bed (i say leaped because it's the truth. if i had simply walked up to the bed and crawled in, the zombies that i am certain were under my bed would have been able to grab my ankles. by leaping, i prevented this from occurring and thus saved my own life). i am proud to say that i resisted the urge to actually look under my bed to make sure they weren't there, but i typically sleep with one foot hanging off the bed. last night i did not. i finally fell asleep around 3 a.m. ( i remember seeing 2:55 on the clock) and had no less than five or six different dreams, all of them scary, none of which i remember specifically, but all of which i recall trying to wake myself up from.

it was a long and awful night. i can't wait to see the next one!