Kkkkhhhaaaa!

I am great at terrifying my husband, Nik. Well, not great, but not bad considering I don’t usually intend to. Except for that time when Zoe and I painted a fake snake and hid it in the garage under his toolbox – that was hysterical. And on purpose. But I unintentionally scared him several weeks ago.

You see, some of my family members talk in their sleep; however, I’ve only done it a handful of times in the past twenty years or so. On night, I was having a series of vivid dreams. In one of those dreams, I was in some type of office building. I had seen a woman I didn’t like (she was fictitious) and thought it would be a great idea to jump up from behind a pile of…whatever was being stored in the closet… and scare her. I peeked through the window of the door, knowing that if she saw me, she would come investigate (I have no idea why, but that’s what I believed in my dream). Once she caught a quick glimpse of me, I buried myself beneath the pile of random junk. When she walked in and turned on the lights, I jumped up with my arms stretched out high above my head like a cartoon zombie and started screaming a kind of hacking “kkkkhhhaaaa” sound.

Then I heard my own voice in a hoarse scream and realized my throat was dry. I felt Nik’s hand on my shoulder as he asked quite anxiously if I was okay. I remember I answered that I was. Then he asked if I had had a bad dream. The dream was still vivid in my mind and I wasn’t awake enough to articulate what I had been thinking, so I just said, “sort of.” He said, “You scared the shit out of me!” and I could almost see his blood pressure peaked. He told me I had raised my arms straight up in the air and made a weird gasping, screaming sound. I imagined looking like a creepy girl from a horror film and my next thought was, “Oh, my God, he probably thinks I’m possessed.” I figured he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep now that I had nearly given him a heart attack.

Once I was able to organize my thoughts, I asked Nik if he wanted to know what my dream was about. He of course said, “sure.” As soon as I opened my mouth to talk, I started giggling. In between bouts of snickers and with accompanying hand gestures, I gave a fragmented explanation of how I had been trying to jump out from beneath a pile of junk in a closet and scare some lady in my dream. He looked like he was trying very hard not to smile at the absurdity and shook his head as if to say, “I can’t believe you almost gave me a heart attack for that.” I’m pretty sure he had thought I was being murdered in my dream. Luckily, he has a great sense of humor because he started laughing, which made me laugh some more. So, there we were in the wee hours of the morning with a case of the giggles where you can’t talk, all because I had wailed like some deranged zombie trying to scare someone who wasn’t even real.

In the morning, I told my daughter, Zoe, the whole story, who happened to think it was hilariously amusing. A little while later when all three of us were in the living room, she randomly threw her arms up in the air and gave her best interpretation of my “kkkkhhhaaa” scream, which of course made Nik almost jump off the couch and turned all three of us into cackling hyenas…I may have suggested the idea to her. I wonder how he’s going to get me back.