An unearthly experience

The past couple of days have seen my health go a bit down and up, no thanks to a mild bout of flu. A day off from work coupled with a cocktail of medication seem to have brought me back to my best, but then hadn't really planned for the associated fallouts - the grogginess and the daze.

Anyway, everything seemed fine, except that I was having a sleepless night yesterday. Perhaps, an effect of sleeping all day, or maybe, due to the new non-drowsy cough syrup I was trying out. So, there I was looking at the minutes ticking away on my alarm clock, trying to catch at least a few winks of sleep before daybreak.

I finally seemed to have dozed off when I was awakened by some sounds from the living room. The clock showed 3-49 and I realized that there were just another three hours of possible sleep left. I almost drifted off to sleep again when I heard the sound of the shower running. Now, was it from my bathroom, or was it so silent that I could hear the sounds from my adjacent apartment? A minute or two of soporific thought and I had to dismiss the latter idea as some creative imagination from a hyperactive brain. Still, the thought of getting up to check out the source of the sounds was a bit too much for me.

As I lay in my bed wondering what to do next, it suddenly hit me that there might be someone out there. Now, blame it on a sedated mind or the horror-buff that I am, my first thoughts weren't about any burglars or thieves. The very next moment though, I laughed away at those fantastic ideas. And then, I sensed something was really wrong.

As I suddenly turned around to look, a white specter passed my bedroom door. In a jiffy, the sleep from my eyes vanished and I was wide awake. As I jumped off from my bed, I found him at my bedroom door looking straight at me. The ash-white skin and blood-red eyes presented a spine-chilling spectacle. And suddenly, life had become a horror film in itself.

"Calm down", he said and surprisingly, I somehow managed to soothe my nerves. "I used to live around here...", he went on as I found the room suddenly turning frosty and unable to concentrate on what he was saying. The words just sounded like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo until...

"...before death came in". Damn ! Those were the last words I wanted to hear. So, this spooky-faced, ash-skinned fellow said he was a ghost. Now if he really was one, he wasn't doing anything scary at all. Other than appearing uninvited in the middle of the night, that is.

"Can you fly?" I was embarassed the moment I blurted out those words. But at that instant, it seemed to be the only plan that I had of getting him out of my house. And well, the words simply came out the moment I thought of them.

With a smile, he slid out the open windows and hovered in the air. But before I could even think of closing the windows, he was back in. And my mind simply blanked out. He started on with his stories once again, but I was in no position to grasp a word of it, and I guess I must have simply passed out.

The fresh sounds of the morning woke me up and to my bitter surprise, I found him sitting next to my bed and still babbling on and on. I looked at the clock and it was 6 am, but the daylight seemed to have no effect on him. Slowly and stealthily, I slipped out of my bedroom, ran out onto the stairs and out of the building. Well, I guess I wasn't really successful as he was there right next to me.

As luck would have it, I found some of the morning joggers near the entrance and quickly scampered towards them. He followed. What was strange though, was that none of them were alarmed by him, even when he simply flew over them. In fact, nobody even noticed him. And that got me thinking all over again.

Was I simply imagining this? Flying phantasma and ghostly apparitions! Hey, these are not supposed to exist. Was my mind playing tricks on me? Did my mind finally give way to the stress of a high-pressure job day in and day out?

I turned to look at him again and there was no one out there. Oh boy, guess it was time for me to see a psychiatrist... damn, but I had never felt schizophrenic at all. And this was a first of its kind experience too. Was it because of lack of sleep, or was it because I had really lost it? I just stood there at the entrance to my building wondering...

...when my train of thoughts was broken by the alarm clock going off. As I opened my eyes and looked at the bedroom door, try as I might, I couldn't even imagine seeing a ghostly specter. When it came to dreams, this really had to be the weirdest of them all. Guess Sigmund Freud would have something to say about it.

And yeah, the non-drowsy cough syrup seems to be seriously muddling my brain. I was better off with the usual one. It at least guaranteed blissful sleep.