Thoughts About Late Night Fears.
Last weekend, I was unexpectedly awoken from a deep sleep by a dream that felt quite out of the ordinary as I usually never remember any of them.
As I laid in bed absorbed by the depth of silence and darkness, my surroundings blurred by my shortsightedness, I surveyed my physical state unable to pinpoint exactly what caused the abrupt interruption — the only clear thing was the acute sense of fear that sat on my heart like a heavy brick.
Startled, I reached for my phone; it was 3.35 AM.
Suddenly, as the fluttering feeling of anxiety in my chest kept getting sharper, the odd dream resurfaced in my mind like a flashback: it dawned on me I had just killed a man.
It wasn’t a regular gruesome killing like the ones you see in horror movies with a lot of gore and splatter everywhere.
It was more dramatic, slow, and theatrical as if the incident was happening on the stage of a period play.
I had just killed the man with a three-pronged fork, the same kind that you read Neptune carries in Roman or Greek mythology, but there was no blood.
The victim just fell to the ground – one hand gripping the wooden handle – like a half-empty sack of potatoes collapsing on itself.
That wasn’t where or how the dream had started; matter of fact, the oneiric reminiscence didn’t even feature a thrilling battle between me and the middle-aged man.
It was more like a sequence of scenes that played out in a cinematic fashion. It followed what is called an “Arc” in screenplay’s terminology.
The dream began with a fairly mundane scene: my friend Giulia arriving to visit me in Palermo and deciding she wanted to take a shower before going out for what I am assuming was dinner.
The setting of the dream wasn’t familiar.
The apartment where we stayed was blueish, dark, and humid – the total opposite of what my airy home looks like.
The bathroom was inside the bedroom – which also appeared to be the only two rooms in the whole house – and the whole floor was covered by the same kind of stiff greige moquette that was in my first apartment in Los Angeles.
For some unknown reason, I chose to step out before my friend could get ready.
As I left the old building where – according to the dream – I lived, I found myself in a dimly lit square lined with food trucks.
It was suspiciously silent. People were sitting around some simple foldable, wooden tables in semi-darkness not making any noise, they were just looking down at their food.
That same blueish tone that characterized the apartment I had just left laid somber over the scene.
The only bright lights were coming from the stands, where stereotyped Sicilian men in white aprons waved their arms around to attract customers despite the emptiness of the area.
I kept walking and I turned the corner, just to find an even emptier and darker scene.
I looked up and noticed two AS Palermo flags hanging on top of a building. They were static. I remember thinking “I should take a picture” but for some reason, I kept going. Maybe the darkness felt unsafe.
My surroundings continued to be painted in a blue hue.
All of a sudden, an older man with a thick mustache dressed in traditional Sicilian garments – coppola and a woolen brown melange suit – appeared out of nowhere and started harassing me.
After a brief back and forth, I picked up the fork — I have no idea where it came from — and struck him.
That’s when I woke up with a profound sense of fear preventing me from falling back asleep.
I lay in bed enthralled by my own thoughts, trying to decipher the meaning of this bizarre dream but soon my mind was wandering away from what had just happened to focus on one of my deepest fears: burglars.
I spent a big chunk of my childhood in a small town situated in the Northern Italian countryside; a quiet place where everybody knows everybody but also the type of place that is so remote and unsurveilled, it is often targeted by petty thieves.
My family home was broken into four or five times – even though one time it was a staged break-in. Upgrade your subscription and you will find out why in one of the chapters of my dad’s biography – and the fear of my privacy being violated by strangers has stuck with me ever since.
Since living in an apartment complex, my Scelerophobia (the phobia of burglars) has toned down but on certain occasions, almost always at 3 AM and definitely after watching true-crime documentaries before bed, it flares up and it forces me to raise from bed to check my door is actually locked.
Eventually, I was able to succumb back to slumber for another couple of hours before my alarm went off.
The next morning my late-night distress had vanished, *pouf*.
There was not a trace of that heavy feeling in my chest, it was like nothing ever happened.
I didn’t think too much of it until, as I scrolled through the Pocket app, I serendipitously stumbled across an article written by Greg Murray – Professor and Director, Centre for Mental Health, Swinburne University of Technology, Swinburne University of Technology – for The Conversation, that perfectly explained what goes on in our brain in those late hours.
The title read “Why do we wake around 3 am and dwell on our fears and shortcomings?”
Curious, I kept on reading. But it wasn’t long before I suddenly remembered that I once heard about the esoteric – and superstitious – essence of 3 AM, also known as The Devil’s hour.
I sulked for a second. Had I been visited by a demon?
Fortunately, the answer to that question is no.
According to the author, the hour between 3 and 4 AM is a part of our sleep cycle when we are “at our lowest ebb, physically and emotionally” and so it’s easier to catastrophize whatever worry may be affecting us in our daily life.
The truth is, our mind isn’t really looking for a solution at 3 am. We might think we are problem-solving by mentally working over issues at this hour, but this isn’t really problem-solving; it’s problem-solving’s evil twin – worry.
Worry is identifying a problem, ruminating about the worst possible outcome and neglecting the resources we would bring to bear should the non-preferred outcome actually occur.
Scientifically speaking, the so-called Witching Hour, is nothing less than a natural physiological process.
At this time, the body temperature begins to increase, the need for sleep starts to decline as a portion of sleep has already been achieved, the production of melatonin, the hormone responsible for sleep, reaches its highest levels, and cortisol, the hormone related to stress, begins to rise in preparation for waking up and starting the day.
So how to reverse this temporary insomnia? Grounding yourself and focusing on your breathing is a way to prevent crankiness in the morning.
Practicing mindfulness in the traditional sense of the word, not the Westernized one, is also an antidote.
As far as crazy dreams are concerned though, I suggest writing them down. They could be the base for a great novel or movie.
AFTER-THOUGHTS
I feel like the quality of my thoughts and writing has decreased lately.
Re-reading the first essays I published here, against some of my recent musings, I feel proud of my achievements but I am somewhat questioning my skills at the same time.
This is quite possibly the result of an overwhelming period I am going through and the inability to yet focus solely on writing as a practice.
I am writing this because I noticed it is quite common for fellow creatives — especially the young ones — to fall trap to the perennial imposter syndrome afflicting the lives of those who take their craft seriously.
As with everything in life, it is normal to have periods of ups and periods of downs. The secret is to keep pushing through.
“I don’t know whether other authors feel it, but I think quite a lot do- that I’m pretending to be something that I’m not, because even nowadays, I do not quite feel as though I am an author.”
— best selling author, Agatha Christie