* Ostrich Mentality

Have you ever had those nights when you are pretty sure that there is a presence in the room, more often than not sharing your bed? Every small sound in the room magnified, the scratch of a frigging calendar sounding like shuffling steps – although the yet unproved hypothesis that ghosts are not uniped/biped/triped/any-ped for that matter never once crossing the big wad of jelly that you call your brain!

What would you do when the shadows on the wall begin to look like all those caricatures that you’ve mentally conjured up to symbolize a monster or two? Rather than rising up to fight the demon with a pillow fashioned as a sword – well, you can improvise here – we end up imitating an ostrich in times of its stress or scare, it buries its head under ground, we bury ours under our blanket, coiling up, an outsider would sort of get an idea that you’ve become an invertebrate all of a sudden – per chance the monster is interested in drinking up that cerebrospinal fluid with a pinch of fear to taste! *shudder*

Have you ever noticed that this fear mostly strikes when we’ve got up in the dead of the night to empty that dratted bladder or perchance fill it up? The house which in daylight seems not so big to fit in your dresser and corner table, assuming the proportions of a rambling manor in the night, the short walk to the loo or the water dispenser seeming fit enough for a half-marathon.

You can’t even turn on your bed lamp to read, what if the monsters get attracted to the light, waiting just outside the sphere of light, ready to pounce and unzip your guts on turning off the lamp? No, the best way to ward it off would be to cover yourself from head to toe, curling up into something resembling a poked-at millipede, waiting with bated breath for the apparition to pass away unnoticed, reciting the name of God at least a hundred times, praying that the being – or is it not? – to glide by leaving you unheeded, but have you given this a thought? What if they are mind-readers? If you can believe in such astral beings then why not go the whole hog and assign all conceivable powers to them starting from a pair of tangible shanks right up to a cognitive ability capable of mutilating your thinking and being?

That leads to another question, why are they most of the time feminine, with long unbraided hair which look badly in need of a wash and conditioning? Why always in a black attire with black rimmed eyes and each tooth shaped to resemble a stake? You know? We ought to start making an honest attempt to change this appearance first, and then probably use “ridikulus!” to turn the phantasm into a joker! But thinking about it again, don’t these jokers look scary themselves with their bloody grin and out of the reality clothing? Confession - Am positively clown-o-phobic!