Morning of the Monsters
In real life, they are not confined only to the darkness.
A recent life experience has prompted me to revisit and reconsider some of the events of my childhood. I’ve tended to focus on those that ended up being most influential on my later years. Socialization was shaped by our earliest interactions; family relationships are governed largely by our own family dynamics as young children. And, our later interests can be heavily influenced by impactful experiences we had.
I still remember details of specific fears I had when, say, navigating down the dark hallway in the wee hours toward the bathroom. Perhaps I’d been reading a book about Bigfoot or one about UFO visitation — I would be certain that a giant hairy hand was about to reach out and grab me, or that turning a corner I would be face-to-face with a hideously misshapen alien figure. Certainly, such memories as these drove me into a career about solving such mysteries. If not a Bigfoot, what then did lie in the dark, and why are our human brains afraid of it? And so I do what I do today.
No early experience, I think, had a more significant effect on this part of my later life than the morning on which I saw the monsters. They were not fearsome at all, and thus the encounter was not a negative one. But there were many of them, and they spoke and even sang, and they tarried for what seemed like 30 minutes. They were not phantoms. They were there.
Rare is the time when we see the scary jacket hanging in the corner of the bedroom, imagining that it may have just moved, when it actually does move. Those break the meter. The mind can handle nothing more loathsome. And so the morning of the monsters was for me — it was impossible for what was happening to happen. I needed a lifeline back to Earth. And so I beelined for my parents’ bedroom and woke them up in a fit of excitement to report what was happening.
