Midnight Irrationality

Last night I woke up at one a.m. to my dog trying to climb into bed with me.

Because it startled me out of a vivid dream, I found my dog's behavior very difficult to process. Even being startled out of a dream and into a completely normal bedroom being can make reality seem like a strange and incomprehensible place. Being dragged into a reality outside the bounds of normalcy, one that included my dog climbing into bed with me in the middle of the night, was something I couldn't hope to make sense of. I feel like you need to pause here and try to imagine this for a minute so that you can really truly understand how confused I was.

As I tried to wrap my head around what Jin might possibly be doing, to push his front paws off my bed, and to remember the details of the dream I'd been living in happily just a few moments before (something about multicolored chocolate truffles, but that's all I've been able to salvage), I could hear a little voice in the back of my head reminding me that Jin only gets on furniture when he's alone in the house or very, very afraid of something. So I sat up and dutifully scanned Jin's bed over by the window for spiders or snakes, because in my still-half-asleep state, the sudden appearance of a nest of spiders or snakes in my apartment seemed like a perfectly reasonable (and oddly non-frightening) explanation for my dog's strange behavior.

Jin, for his part, took my movement as a cue to jump up on the bed and settle himself down between me and the wall with a funny high-pitched yawn (it's not an unusual sound - he makes it all the time). He looked like he had no intention of leaving, and I was completely baffled. But my dog often baffles me, and I also satisfied that there was not a nest of spiders or snakes on his bed, and I was tired. Fine, I thought. It's one o'clock in the morning and if my dog wants to sleep on my bed tonight, I'm not going to put up a fight.

I settled down to try to get back into my multicolored truffle dream, and then Jin made that high-pitched yawn again, and suddenly I realized that the sound wasn't coming from Jin but from the smoke detector in the hallway. All the fuzzy surreality of the few minutes I'd been awake suddenly snapped into focus and I was finally able to construct a rational explanation that involved neither spiders nor snakes. The smoke detector, I realized, must have a low battery and had begun beeping intermittently. Since Jin sleeps more lightly than I do and is more sensitive to higher pitches, it woke him before it woke me. The poor dog had no idea what the noise was or where it was coming from, and he was terrified. I laughed (sleepily), got out of bed, pressed the "silence alarm" button on the smoke alarm in the hallway (Jin followed me to the hall, then went and cowered in the bathroom), and then climbed back into bed.

But instead of slipping back into dreams, I started thinking about carbon monoxide. My upstairs neighbor once told me we have a carbon monoxide detector, and since all I'm aware of are three identical smoke detectors, I always assumed that they must be dual smoke-and-carbon-monoxide detectors or something. But I have no idea what a carbon monoxide alarm sounds like. What if I'd just inadvertently put the carbon monoxide alarm to sleep, and I was slowly being asphyxiated? How would I even know?

It seemed doubtful. The stoves and ovens in the house are electric, and my fireplace isn't functional, and we just got a brand new heating system (partly to eliminate the danger of carbon monoxide leaks that an inspector had found in the old heating system). And if I had three smoke-and-carbon-monoxide detectors (if that's indeed what they were), why would just one of them go off? But I couldn't get the idea out of my head, so I got up again and pulled out my laptop and googled "what does a carbon monoxide alarm sound like?"

"It sounds like your smoke alarm," one website told me. "It may be constant, or it may be intermittent." Great. That sounded like what I just silenced. I googled symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning, hoping that "dying in your sleep" was preceded by other more noticeable warnings, and when I read "headache" my head started to hurt, just a little, and when I read "nausea" my stomach started to feel cramped, just a little. Is this all in my head? I wondered. Or did I just not notice until now? Or are the symptoms slowly increasing as I breathe in more and more carbon monoxide?

I got back up and pressed the "hold to test" button on the smoke detector until it beeped, in the hopes that the smoke-and-allegedly-carbon-monoxide detector would interpret my act as saying "I may have turned you off a moment ago, but now you can resume your former duties. Please please please let me know if I'm in danger of dying of carbon monoxide poisoning in my sleep." The alarm stayed silent. I went to bed. It took a little longer than I would have liked to fall asleep, but eventually I did and, clearly, I did not wake up dead in the morning.

In the light of day everything about last night seems funnier than it did at the time. I know now that it was just a low battery beep, that the carbon monoxide detector is somewhere else entirely. I should have realized that it would be foolish for the carbon monoxide detector engineers to engineer a dual carbon monoxide detector/smoke detector where the carbon monoxide alarm sounds just like a low battery alarm. But, you know, it was one o'clock in the morning. I can be forgiven for a glitch in my logical reasoning. Plus, that little irrational middle-of-the-night incident inspired me to learn more from my upstairs neighbor about our carbon monoxide detection system and where it's located and what it would sound like and what to do if it goes off. That's probably a good householdy lifesaving thing to know.

I do feel a little bad for Jin. What with the balloons and now the smoke detector, he's had a bit of a rough time feeling safe in his own house.