My Screaming Wife

Last night Erica and I went to dinner with our friends Paul, Jenn, Luke and Sarah. After dinner we decided to head back to Paul and Jenn's apartment to watch a movie. The guys went to blockbuster and came back with The Happening. I like M. Night Shyamalan's movies. They are strangely void of human emotion right up until a really emotional part. He understands the concept of scarcity. Anyways, the movie was creepy and I know if we weren't in a room ful of people, we wouldn't have watched it.

So we get in the car to go home (11:30pm) and my wife starts saying "We have to get Cooper in the house before it blows up!" over and over again. You see in the movie one of the signs of "The Happening" is that people stop making sense when they talk. So I said, "You don't want to start that game with me." You know the game I'm talking about...the kind where you keep trying to freak each other out because you just watched a freaky movie. So I'm being very good until she walks into the hallway by herself...I start to close our bedroom door and she freaks out before I actually close it. I did this a couple of times, it was funny.

We watch TV for a while to get our minds on normal stuff and then fall asleep. Success, we're resting right? Wrong! At 3:46:57am I am sound asleep. I am deep in sleep. I'm probably dreaming. I'm peaceful. At 3:47am I awaken to Erica escalating her voice from a quiet protest of "Oh my Gosh," to yelling the same phrase, to the loudest scream (not exaggerating) I've ever heard from her! I didn't know she had it in her to be that loud. Imagine what I think is happening. (see my tweet about it here)

Here are some thoughts running through my mind: "There's someone in this room." "There's a killer on the loose." "There's a creepy old lady with a doll in here." "There's something HAPPENING!"

So what did I do? I did what any loving and FREAKED out husband with adrenaline pumping their his veins would do. I started yelling "Erica! Erica! Erica! Erica!" at the top of my lungs. (I'm pretty sure our neighbors think we're crazy.) I jump off the bed and for some reason I knew that if I just could hold her, everything would be fine. As I'm yelling, I'm trying to pull her in for a hug and she's flailing her arms and turning around in a circle doing a sort of dance. The only way I know how to describe this dance is to say it was to the sounds of "I'm so excited," yet you should replace the word excited with insanely-scared.

The problem with trying to pull my wife in for a hug while she's in this state is that I have skin and she has fingernails. Not long or big, just normal nails. But my finger gets cut in the process by one her fingernails. But I successfully pull her in for an embrace to calms her and allows her to almost laugh, after a few minutes. To add the scene, imagine having a small dog that sleeps in your bedroom. He barks at anything that moves. Imagine his response.

So what did freak her out so much? What was the big deal? She saw a huge spider on top of our bed. That's very strange because there weren't any spiders in the movie.

So we turned on the TV for like an hour and watched a dog show, CNN and random stuff. We were awake for at least another hour after this episode. What's the lesson here? Don't let Erica watch movies with a hint of horror if you want to sleep at night.

Do you have a post-movie dream/hallucination story? Do share.

Technorati tags: the, happening, movie, scared, erica, paul, jenn, luke, sarah, bad, dreams, cooper