The Waking Hours

“The witching hour was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.”

– Roald Dahl, The BFG

(Image Credit: MUTI)

I have always loved reading. Fantasy novels, old wrinkled history books, local newspapers, Waffle Crisp cereal boxes; anything I could get my hands on I quickly and eagerly devoured. For me, reading was an escape from my boring, mundane life. It was a passageway into other worlds, a wardrobe into a thousand different Narnias. But most of all, at night it was a safe haven from the darkness.

My lights had to be out by 10:30, which only gave me half an hour of quiet, uninterrupted reading. It was the best half an hour of every day. The air was still, the house was silent, and I existed only as a warm burrito of blankets with the story and the soft yellow light of my lamp to keep me company.

When I was a kid I was plagued by a somewhat irrational fear of the dark. Several yellow glow-in-the-dark stars were glued to the ceiling in my room in the shape of the Little Dipper, which gave me some small comfort, and the hallway light was always left on. But every night I dreaded the time when I turned off my bedside lamp and was left alone with my thoughts and occasional insomnia.

I wasn’t afraid of the dark as much as I feared the infinite possibilities of horrible things that could happen. When I struggled to fall asleep at night I would imagine hordes of spiders crawling through the window and onto the ceiling, spinning their meticulous webs, and threatening to drop onto me. I would imagine an axe murderer climbing up the stairs of our basement and creeping into our bedrooms to slaughter us one by one. I imagined hearing the screams of terror that would come from my sister’s room, and I would imagine the fear of knowing that I was next and that there was nowhere to hide. My imagination sometimes picked me up and carried me away screaming and kicking.

So I attempted to stay up as late as I could every night, burying myself in the soft, paper-thin blankets of literature in order to avoid the inevitable darkness. Sometimes my mom woke up and came in to tell me to turn the lights off. More often than not, though, she would fall asleep before 10:30 and I could read for as long as I wanted. Just in case, I had a small purple flashlight that I would use to read under the covers. The dimly shining beam of light from my flashlight was like a sword that I used to fend off the darkness; it was a nightly battle.

One fateful night, I was reading one of those old-fashioned books from the 1950s about a girl who was sent to live on a farm with her cousins. The cover was pink and it smelled like the countryside and like my grandparents’ house. It was a warm summer night, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for a long time. The crickets outside were deafening, and the noise of the fan was a continuous drone. I saw my clock change to 11:00 and I decided to switch to reading under the covers, because if my mom found me reading this late she would be quite upset.

I switched on the low light of the flashlight and pulled the covers over my head. Beginning to read, I came to a passage in the book that described a scene in which the girl was watching a mother cat teach her kittens how to drink milk from a bowl. One of the kittens fell into the bowl of milk. I couldn’t help but laugh, and then immediately regretted making a sound.

After a second I heard the dreaded creaking of my mom walking down the hallway. I quickly turned off the flashlight and tried to lie still. She stepped into my room, switched on my light, and pulled the covers off my head with a sharp, indignant glare in her eyes. I sighed and handed over the flashlight.

“The book too,” she said, holding out her hand.

I sadly gave her the book.

“Good night.” She left my room and went back to bed.

I never saw that book again, and I never got to find out what happened next. The rest of the summer was full of long, hot sleepless nights. I turned off my lamp at 10:30 every night and stared out my window for hours until finally I fell asleep, wondering what ever happened to that girl on the farm and her kittens. As a child I was so desperate to avoid the dark, and to avoid that terrible feeling of being alone with your thoughts, especially when they turn to scary things in the night time. I clung to my books, I dived into them headfirst and emerged hours later, holding on to the intricate stories and those fascinating characters so I could keep them in my head for as long as possible. I loved books partly because they offered me what real life could not: freedom, independence, magic, drama.