Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
he had the curious habit of sometimes rising late at night and wandering the house like a ghost, chatting with unseen things, and seeing things that others could not see. Often Mama, awakened by her little dogs who needed to visit the backyard, would catch a glimpse of a shape out in the living room with her peripheral vision. When she came to investigate, there would be Dougie talking to thin air, his unfocused eyes looking about the room and fastening here, flitting there, never seeing Mama.
The first Dougie ever knew that he was a sleepwalker was when he woke up in Mama and Dada's bed, and all the lights were on in the room, and Mama and Dada were pacing about, Dada even checking the little boy's arms to see if he was on drugs (Dougie could only have been about seven years old at the time). They started asking him if he knew who he was, who they were, what was his name? Other silly questions for parents to ask their child.Then Mama explained to him that he had been walking around in the living room, that he had crouched down and gone under the baby grand piano. That he crouched as if ready to enter a football huddle, and then his face grew very sad as if he missed all the other players, and no matter what Mama and Dada did they couldn't wake him. Even when they forced him into their bed he seemed to be talking to someone else, not aware of their presence. Dada kept interrupting Mama to ask if Dougie had taken any drugs, any pills, if he had consumed anything weird.They never quite said so, but they were probably thinking he was possessed by the devil. Once Mama found Dougie standing over the bathtub as if it were the toilet, and she scolded him and led him over to the appropriate receptacle. Dougie grunted and headed back for the bathtub. In his dream state, the normal reality had switched places. But Mama's wisdom finally convinced him to do things the normal way.Going camping seemed to kick off the phenomena, as almost every time he slept in a tent he would find himself scrabbling at the zipper, emerging into the night, completely unaware of where he was, or why he was in such a strange situation, or what it was so dark. Going camping with the Pathfinders had camp leaders yelling at him to go back to sleep, when Dougie emerged from his tent, yelling incomprehensible things into the night. As he grew older, he experienced less and less sleepwalking and sleeptalking, but it happened a few times even when he was at boarding school in the eleventh and twelfth grades. His roommates usually got a kick out of questioning him, or responding to the nonsense words he spoke into the night.Was he viewing into another world? Or was it all merely just an over-active imagination manifesting in very lucid dreams?All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
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