Things that go bump in the night

Recently I've developed an irrational fear of the nighttime. OK, not the nighttime specifically. Rather, I'm afraid that there are intruders in our house in the middle of the night.

We've been living in our house for four months and this fear only just started. Hey, I SAID it was irrational. I guess I just didn't think about it before, AND we have a dog and a pretty good guard dog at that.

For the first month or so that we lived in the house the dog slept in her crate with the door latched shut, so she wouldn't have been any use as a guard dog anyway. Then Torsten went on his first business trip and I felt a little nervous being home alone at night, so I started leaving her crate door open, and now we always do that. It makes me feel better to know that if she hears a noise, she can go investigate it, and that if somebody is trying to break in she will likely scare them off with her barking.

But even then, even when I started thinking about it I wasn't really nervous. Even when Torsten started saying that he felt uncomfortable without some sort of security system, I wasn't really nervous.

Even though it kind of makes sense to be nervous, doesn't it? In the past we've always lived in apartments, buildings with secure access and doormen, and we were always above the ground floor with only one door and a few windows, and any weird sounds that we heard could easily be attributed to noisy neighbors.

Now we're in a house, a big creaky house with several doors and lots of old windows and no doorman. It just FEELS less secure.

So, I agreed with Torsten and we purchased an alarm, the monitored kind that automatically connects to the police when there's a problem. But we didn't buy motion sensors for it right away. At first we just had door and window sensors, the kind that set off the alarm if the door or window is opened.

Still, the fear didn't start right away. The thing that triggered it was a few weeks ago when the light rail, which runs along the highway behind our house, made a very strange noise at about four a.m. We're used to the light rail going by at all hours and we don't really hear it, even if we leave our window open, but this noise was different. It was a very loud, very distinct, repeated thumping noise, and it sounded like it was right in our house.

It woke us both up and we looked at each other and listened for awhile and didn't hear anything else. And we looked at the dog and saw that she was unperturbed and we told ourselves that it was nothing and tried to go back to sleep. Torsten did, I think, but I lay awake for an hour with my heart pounding, freaking out every time I heard the slightest little sound. I had to pee but I was scared that there were people in my house and that they would hear me if I got out of bed. On a rational level I KNEW that if there were people in our house the alarm would have gone off and the dog would be barking... but who is rational at four in the morning?

At around five, the sound happened again and woke Torsten up again, and I convinced him to go downstairs with Montana to check out the situation. At four a.m. I'd been thinking that the thumping was the sound of thieves dragging our TV out of our house, but when it happened again I was able to tell myself that maybe it was an animal. Or the trash can. Or something else innocuous.

As soon as Torsten turned on the hall light I felt better. He inspected the whole house and yard, and (of course) found nothing. And then I felt better too. After that, I managed to fall asleep.

But you know what's strange? Even though now I KNEW that that noise means nothing, and is just the light rail, and it's not like there actually WERE armed intruders in our house? After, every little nighttime noise freaked me out. If a noise woke me up I would totally lie in bed hallucinating other noises and convincing myself that someone was about to creep into our bedroom and murder us. Even though I KNEW it was ridiculous. I KNEW IT, but when I was lying in bed in the middle of the night and my heart felt like it was about to leap out of my chest, trying to be rational just didn't work.

However, it has gotten better. There was one week where it was really terrible, and I slept like shit every night because something would ALWAYS wake me up and scare me, and then I would lie there terrifying myself with imaginary scenarios, figuring out ways that burglars could get into the house without setting off the alarm, and not be able to go back to sleep.

But now it's mostly better. We got motion sensors for the alarm, for one thing. So now I know that even if a burglar somehow manages to get into the house without setting off the door and window sensors, the alarm would STILL go off as soon as they took a step into the house.

And also, I looked up the crime statistics for our neighborhood over the past few years, and they are extremely low. And even the crimes that have occurred in the neighborhood have occurred in a few specific areas that are not anywhere near our house. In the past five years, there has only been one crime in what I consider to be our section of the neighborhood, and none at all on our street. And I couldn't tell from the map what kind of crime it was, so I choose to assume that it was something minor like a car break-in, and nothing that was actually dangerous.

After those two things happened, it took me a few days of middle-of-the-night wakeups to teach myself to calm down. To remind myself that the noise CAN'T mean anything, because if it did, the alarm would be going off, FOR REAL. And that the likelihood of anyone even trying to break into our house, regardless of dog and alarm, is very slim.

And I had a whole rationale behind these self-reminders. I assumed the there are two types of break-ins: crimes of opportunity and premeditated crimes. We lock our doors and windows and therefore prevent any crimes of opportunity. And we can only assume that a premeditated crime would include some scoping out of the target house ahead of time, and any potential criminal who did that would see that we have a protective dog who barks AND an alarm, and pick a different house to target.

Add that to the low crime statistics for the neighborhood, and the odds of anyone trying to break into our house are very low. And yes, I realize that I'm overthinking this but I NEEDED that kind of logic to make myself be reasonable. Especially given the level of panic that I was feeling in the middle of the night.

So, yes, after a few days I'm pretty much back to the way I used to be, not freaking out if I wake up in the middle of the night, and actually able to get a good night's sleep. Thank GOD. I don't think I can adequately express how STRESSFUL it was to wake up almost EVERY NIGHT and imagine that someone was coming to get me. A grown-up bogeyman, if you will.

But even yet, every now and then that damn light rail makes that weird loud thumping noise and wakes me up, and even armed with all my tactics for talking myself off the ledge, it STILL gives me a good few minutes of freaking myself out.

Am I the only person who still lets herself get freaked out by things she should have grown out of 20 years ago? Please tell me I'm not alone in this.