The Midnight Visitor

I was sleeping on my side as I’m inclined to do. I opened my eyes in the middle of the night because something had awakened me. Everything was dimly lit, the moon casting faint shadows into our room through the shades beside our bed. I turned to my back, stretched out my toes, and stared up at the darkened ceiling, trying to get comfortable.

I found myself gazing up at a creepy old man crawling out of our ceiling. It seemed as if a trap door had been cut into the ceiling directly above my side of the bed, and he was using it to crawl out of our ceiling and land on top of us. He was an elderly man, and his white, bearded face scowled back at me as he began to lower himself through the trap door.

Worried he was going to drop onto our bed and harm my husband and I, I threw the covers off, leapt out of the bed, and ran to the wall where the light switch was. I flipped on the lights and yelled, “A man is going to drop on us!” Joe, my husband, sat up and looked around wildly, his eyes a strange mixture of sleep and fear.

My eyes eventually adjusted to the brightness of the room, and I stared up at the ceiling from which the man had been hanging. He was gone. I shook my head and looked again. The faint lines that had marked the trap door were no longer there, and the scowling man had vanished, just like that. My heart continued to race as I assured myself that it all been just a dream.