1:44 a.m. and I am WIDE awake. I have this insomnia/paranoia thing going on lately… I don’t get to bed until uber late. I’d say that my average bedtime has become around 3am, and I’m usually awake by 8:30am. That is not enough sleep! I’ve always been good at running on minimal rest, but I’ve been getting super tired lately.
I’m not sure where the insomnia junk is coming from, and I’ve been struggling to sleep for a few months now. However, the paranoia is a recent addition that has only made things worse.
The other night there was a big spider in my room… and a large beetly-looking spindly insecty thing… I had to wake my dad up at 2am to kill them so that i could get to bed…
Well, initially I hoped that texting my mom would result in her coming to help me without having to wake my dad. At first, I had only spotted the spider and I believe the exact words of my text were, “there is a scary spider in my room! help help, really scary, huge. help me!” But, she didn’t hear her phone go off (I think, due to some very loud snoring… I’ll let you speculate as to which one of my lovely parents were responsible for that). I had to take a different approach…
My bedroom is right across the hall from my parents, and this particular night they had their bedroom door open. My extremely mature and well-thought out plan B was to open my bedroom door, turn on my light and stand in the hallway until one of them saw me. I figured that the light flooding from my room to their room would be enough to wake one of them up, and then someone would come to my rescue. So, I turned on the light and stood in their doorway, expectantly… and kept standing their… and remained there for a good five minutes – always keeping one eye on the intruder on my bedroom floor. This plan really failed neither one of them stirred in the slightest.
Finally, I realized that I might have to resort to actually nudging a parent awake or taking on the arachnid, myself. I was strategizing the best way to kill the spider, surveying my bedroom for shoes when all of a sudden something caught my eye.
A beetly-insect had crawled out from under my bed; this thing was huge! Bulbous and many-legged and so much scarier than the spider. I couldn’t help but to scream a little (well, a lot really) and dash into my parents bedroom. The “yelp” jolted my dad awake and he jumped up, extremely startled, “What’s wrong! What’s wrong! Are you ok!”
I squeaked, “Dad, there is a huge, massive spider in my room, I’ve never seen anything like it, it’s horrible, etc. etc.”
I made my plea, as convincingly as I could — yet… I don’t think my dad found it quite convincing enough….
He gave me a “are you freaking-kidding me… Seriously? Seriously? Really bethany, you just scared the crap out of me because of a bug, didn’t you just turn nineteen years old?” kind of look and lovingly came over to my room to kill the offenders.
I pointed to the bug and spider and he quickly killed them, exclaiming in a way that suggested he was giving me very good news, “Bethany, that other bug was just a beetle, and that spider wasn’t really all that big.”
The words, “it was just a beetle” were far from comforting. (Where the heck do beetles come from? I’d never seen one in my house before…) my dad kept repeating his statement, for some reason he thought that it would make the situation less scary or something… “It’s just a beetle, it’s just a beetle.”
“Dad. Just a beetle means nothing to me. It was just a spider, and a scary, unfamiliar, disgusting, muy muy grande, fast-moving, revolting kind of insect that I have never seen before. Thanks for killing it, but I’m sleeping downstairs, and tomorrow we HAVE to do one of those raid-bomb things in my room.”
I continued to declare it the worst night of my life, and as I opened the bathroom door and a moth was flitting against the light bulb on my mirror, an infestation of the cruelest sort. I proceeded to grab my pillow and go sleep on the couch downstairs.
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I’m nervous to ever go to bed now, my room is like infested or something…And I spotted a few moths lurking around the house a few hours ago (a moth-tsunami has always been my biggest fear and most dreaded potential theme for any horror film…) and they will probably flutter upstairs towards the warmer temp and enter my room while I’m sleeping and land on me or something… or I’ll eat one. I’ve always been disgusted by the claim that we eat bunches of spiders and bugs in our sleep….
Read this excerpt from an article I found:
“Facts show that spiders do climb onto the beds when hunting by night while human are sleeping. They go in search for insects, but not humans, of course. Yet spiders bite humans in their sleep, because people move while sleeping and roll onto them (more in why spider bite while human is sleeping). Now, spiders do hide in small dark places, especially holes, and the thing is a mouth wide open when being asleep just appears as a good place to hide.
That is true, but wait; first of all, we are breathing. That is hot air going in and out from our mouth, and the spiders know –in the way spiders can know something– that such hole is not a place to be safe. There is also another thing: despite the fact that a person can be asleep, the inside of the mouth is real sensitive, and anything with legs crawling into our tongue is really enough to make us wake up. Even if awake does not happen, we will probably push back the spider with the tongue, or close the mouth immediately when something is over our face, or take it off with a sleepy hand.”
Ok, that is not comforting AT ALL. Even if the chances of me eating the spider are low, this is confirming that when I turn out my light and go to bed, spiders are on the move. They are going to crawl up my walls, on my bed, in my sheets, in my body crevices and up and around my face! Terrifying!
AND, to make matters worse, if I get a retard-spider who doesn’t realize that my mouth is a hole that is “not a place to be safe”, I’m going to wake up!!! My stupid “sensitive” tongue will notice the spider and I will wake up to the horrifying realization that my biggest fear has come true. Who wants to wake up to a spider in their mouth!, Once the thing is on your FACE, or in your mouth, it’d be better to stay asleep, and never know that it happened!
Bugs SUCK. I want to go back to Denver, I never saw one bug in my room my entire year in that dorm room (except for my roommate’s totally preventable computer incident with the Arubian ants, which is a story for another time)…
