The Mouse

I don't normally write in the morning, but I'm freaking out. So last night around 3 a.m. I woke up to go to the bathroom. I was still half asleep--like, more than just groggy, I was pretty much sleep walking. I was in the bathroom and all of a sudden from behind the toilet this little mouse comes running out. I didn't know what to do. It started running around the walls and nosing at the door, so what I did--I was so confused--I just opened the door and it ran out into the hallway. Great idea, right? Then I don't remember anything after that.

I just woke up, and I honestly don't know if that really happened last night. It doesn't seem like a dream, it's much more vivid in my mind right now. But something about it is so weird, like

1) The fact that I don't remember anything after the mouse left is suspicious. It's not like the mouse drugged me. It seems like a jump cut in a dream.

2) The rest of the night I actually had dreams (that I know were dreams) about mice. Is this because I really saw a mouse? Or did I just have mice on the mind from the beginning?

3) This is where it gets real complex: yesterday after my class at CRLS we were debriefing in the breakout room, and a mouse DID run out from behind this filing cabinet, around the wall, and out into the hall. Did that trigger some sort of dream or hallucination?

It's also suspicious that I didn't freak out more and wake Adam up or something. I mean, maybe I was just too tired to know what was going on. Either way, though, it wasn't completely a dream, because I know that I went to the bathroom, just not whether the mouse came. Maybe I fell asleep in the bathroom?

Here is what the mouse might have looked like:



I read this article about memory once by that neurologist guy Oliver Sacks (who wrote "Awakenings"). He talked about how he had this vivid childhood memory of a bomb falling in his neighborhood in England during WWII. Like, he remembered it so clearly. Then one day his family members were like "Oliver, you weren't there." And they--who had been there when the bomb dropped--all agreed that he wasn't there. They had proof, too, like records of him being at his aunt's house or something. Anyway, Sacks figures that because he heard his older brother tell the story so many times, he eventually just wrote a memory of it into his brain. So he has this memory of being there that he would swear to, but he wasn't there. Also, I once heard this psychologist speaking on NPR about planting memories in people, how you can really do it. Her reasearch team was able to convince people that as a kid they had gone to Disney World and met Bugs Bunny--which is impossible, right, because Bugs Bunny is Warner Bros. So anyway, I'm always skeptical of my memories unless there were witnesses.

I guess if I see the mouse today my questions will be answered. Personally I hope it wasn't real, because I don't want to have to kill a mouse.