Late night hallucinations

Or early morning. Whichever.

The strange heat wave we've been having has been taking a serious toll on my sleep pattern.

You see, I usually run on the cold side. Everyone around me can be comfortable and I am wrapped up in blankets with a hat on. Except when I sleep. At night I radiate heat, in the summer and winter, and there has been many a chilly morning when I have woken up to find Andy just short of laying on top of me in search of warmth.

So when it's extra  hot outside I don't sleep as soundly.

For example, I've been having a lot of very strange, very vivid dreams lately.

One night I dreamed I had a baby and it looked kind of like Little Critter.

Another night I dreamed that I took my family out on the ski slope and there was a gigantic avalanche. While we were searching for survivors Robert Pattinson showed up and apparently I knew him. He was acting very friendly and my dream self was getting uncomfortable because I thought he was hitting on me. Then I woke up.

I'm pretty sure there was a dream where I met the Pioneer Woman too.

Normally I don't dream. At all.

And then last night I just woke up. That NEVER happens. I never just wake up from a dead sleep.

It wasn't like I was restless. I could have gone right back to sleep, but I woke up and then I had this sort of paranoid feeling like I wouldn't have woken up like that if there wasn't something wrong. Have you ever done that?

So then I got really still and started to listen. I could hear Andy breathing and then I thought for sure I could hear footsteps on the carpet in our room.

And then all of a sudden I heard growling.

My heart jumped into my throat and then I did my best look-around-while-trying-to-look-like-I'm-still-asleep maneuver. There was nothing and I shortly realized that the "growling" was Andy snoring lightly. Yeah...

But there was still a rustling noise.

I risked a little more movement and saw that there was a plastic shopping bag in the floor that was moving. The ceiling fan was on and that very likely could have been what was moving it, but it just seemed like it was moving too much for that.

Was it a bunny? Had Andy forgotten to put the bunnies away?

Doubtful for many reasons, not the least of which being that they would have made themselves known long before I'd had the chance to sink into a deep slumber. They CAN NOT resist an open bedroom door, and on the off chance that they found themselves alone in a quiet house, they would have been in our bedroom faster than you could say "rascally rabbit."

So the bunnies were definitely put away, safe and sound.

But why was the bag moving like that? A mouse? A rat? A snake?

I picked up my cell phone and used the display light to try to see what it was. That didn't help at all.

My options were to:

A) Wake up Andy to make him check. That could have been detrimental to my well being.

B) Turn on the lamp, waking up Andy in the process, and risking a "critter" being startled and running away. In the wrong direction. Like onto the bed or something.

C) Get out of bed and walk over to the bag to try to see if there was anything there. In the dark. With only the light from my phone for "protection."

Ha! Yeah. Like that was really going to happen.

I quickly surmised that none of those were really viable options, and that I was tired and I wanted to go back to sleep.

So I chose option D) Roll over, bury my head under the covers and hope that whatever it was crawled back out the same hole it came in through. And if it was only the air from the ceiling fan moving the bag then hopefully the blanket over my head would drown out the noise enough for me to go back to sleep.

Mystery not solved. I can live with that because I went back to sleep very shortly.

But I've removed the bag from the floor and tonight I'm only sleeping with the sheet.