6 am. Just woke up from one of those nightmares in which you're alone in the house, you've got the lights off as you watch TV except for maybe one lamp in another room, and as you glance over that direction for no reason, and you notice a shadow cross it. There's someone in the house. There's someone in the freaking house.

You get up, heart hammering, so scared you can hardly move, and make your way to the front door, expecting the entire time to be grabbed from behind. You fumble with the door lock, fingers clumsy with fear, afraid to even look behind you, and you manage to open the damn door and run out into the night. You consider going into your neighbor's house, a nice old lady, a friend of the family, and you think, "No, I can't go into Mrs. __'s house, what if they come in and hurt her and she won't be able to do anything to protect me either, no I'll go one more door down to Mr. Liang's house, he can help me, he'll keep me safe, run run run."

So you make it to Mr. Liang's house and you think about ascending the stairs up to his front door, and then something makes you pause. You don't even know what it is, but you pause and you don't go up his white-painted porch to his front door because something doesn't feel right and you know, you KNOW that Liang is in on it, he's the mastermind, he's standing there, waiting for his fucking henchmen to report in that they've killed you, or worse, captured you. He's standing there, arms folded, waiting for the report, and as you start to creep away around the house to somewhere else, somewhere safe for god's sake, you see a white car slowly drive past the house and you know the game is up. You start to run but Liang lives on a cliff and you find yourself trapped between a burly brute twice your weight and a sheer fall of Hoover Dam-proportions.

There's a cable down the cliff, which has inexplicably changed to real dam walls, and you edge toward it, desperate, and the henchman sneers. You have no idea what he says, but then he pounces and you're both going over the edge and struggling to grab that cord and then, because it's a dream, for god's sake, you're clinging to a queen sized mattress, falling down, down, down, and the henchman's got the desperate look this time, because he's falling off the mattress, and you scream at him that you're going to float on the river below on this mattress and that he isn't and he's going to fall and hit the river like a load of bricks and mwah hah hah hah. The wind's whipping past both of you as you fall and then you wake up, heart pounding, earplugs and eye mask still on from five hours ago when you fell asleep, and you realize it was a dream. It was just a dream.

Some months back, I wrote about checking under the bed. Shortly before I went to Korea two years ago, my roommate at the time went on a vacation, and I was alone in the apartment. I found myself checking the closets and under the bed before I went to sleep. What was I checking for? Axe murderers, I guess. Maybe bogeymen, which is one of those words that looks so funny but means something awful -- in this case, "a terrifying spectre, a hobgoblin."

I never checked under the bed in Korea. For one, it's hard to check "under" your bed when you sleep on the floor. But I never felt the urge to check the closets for the bogeyman (also "an imaginary monster used to frighten children"). What am I afraid of here? Why don't I feel safe?