When I was about 15 and was attending the Kingdom Hall my uncle Jack got married and moved out of the tiny little one room bedroom that was outside in our backyard. It had been converted from a chicken coop!
It was just a four square rectangle with a roof and a bed.
I was very tall and could not stand up straight inside of it.
At night I'd reach inside the door and flick on the lamp and stoop over and sit on the edge of the bed. Then, when I was ready to go to sleep
I'd click off the light and pull up the covers and snooze.
I was all by myself. This mini-me house sat isolated away from the real house about 10 yards away. Private. Solitary.
Then, half-asleep and half-awake one night I became aware of something....something....very peculiar!
You know how it is when you've been sleeping and you are partially alerted to an outside-of-sleep event that awakens you and flips the "on" switch in your brain: you crawl back out of slumber and start calculating this and that.
It was pitch black dark. The sound of the distant freeway was always there. You got use to traffic, trucks, motorcycles as a pattern. It didn't bother you at all. Our property was surrounded by all sorts of sheltering trees that would move when there was a wind. Those creaky sounds and leafy rustling were also a commonplace background. Just white noise.
No, it wasn't a sound. It was....something...else...but, what?
Some part of my brain was on high alert! Like a watchdog. Ears perked, low growl....that's what my brain was doing.
Okay. You've got my attention. Now, out with it--what's bother you?
Slow dawning of information.......until--YES! I KNEW what woke me up.
My....sheet...and covers...were....crawling off of me!
MY SHEET AND COVERS WERE SLOWLY.....almost imperceptibly....CRAWLING OFF OF ME..........
as though something..................or someone............were crouching at the foot of my bed pulling..tugging..hauling them down an inch or so at a time.
I'd feel the bed shaking...Exorcist style...and this was before the movie was made.
No, there was NObody there. No room for anybody--for one thing.
I was scared and then I was more scared and then I was very scared and then I was absolutely shivering witless, shitless and terrified!
Naturally. You would be too.
There was nothing funny about it. But, the funny thing was....as I placed more attention on it...it would stop. But--if I started relaxing and drifting
back to sleep it would start again..like it was just waiting......to catch me asleep.
This would happen now and again. Sporadically.
It got to where I really had a loathing forboding about going out to that little room!
I told my story at the Kingdom Hall and you better believe I got all kinds of suggestions!
It was a DEMON ATTACK I was assured!
Scream the name of JEHOVAH out loud and the demons will go away!
Oh boy. You know the drill.
Okay, let's fast forward many years down the road. We'll say a decade later. I'm no longer a boy--I'm now 23 and married.
One evening we had some friends over to our house and the wives were discussing their husbands and we husbands were talking about
our wives. We all do this--right?
Mild digs. Sort of joking complaints. That sort of thing. Nothing hostile.
So, anyway...my wife tells one on me and my attention went on FULL ALERT! I suddenly had a major epiphany!
Oh my GAWD!
Here is what she said to the other sisters about me:
"Yeah Terry drives me crazy. He has restless limb syndrome or something. At night he shakes his foot in bed and it slowly pulls the sheet down and in the
winter I get cold and have to keep pulling it back up again."
WOW!
No kidding?
I suddenly felt like a gigantic idiot. I laughed and laughed and laughed at the relief and sudden insight.
Because I had believed in demons I attached that fear as the CAUSE.
All those years of sweating bullets I was just unconciously shaking my own foot!!!
Lesson learned!
