A seven hundred pound alligator trapped me in my bedroom last night. Through the door I could hear intermittent huffs and loud slithers whenever it moved lazily across my living room floor.

I suffer from night terrors. One in ten children have them. One in a hundred adults get them. Essentially it’s a bad dream that makes you scream yourself awake. Unfortunately you scream everyone else in the house awake too. My mother had night terrors a lot when I was growing up so I figured all adults had them and that my Dad was just absurdly well adjusted or a really quiet screamer.

Last night I dreamed that instead of people having dogs as house pets they had alligators. So after being bitten on the leg and on the torso, finally an alligator went for my head. Predictably I shrieked bloody murder until my shrill soprano voice was so loud that I woke myself up.

Normally when this happens Roscoe will roll over, rub my back and say “I promise there isn’t a herd of goats in the bedroom trampling you.” or “Coelacanths are extinct, and have no teeth. Go back to sleep.” Which is not true- coelacanths turn up everywhere in fact there’s probably one knocking on your door as I type this. However Roscoe is completing a surgery elective in Windsor this week and so I was all alone in the bed.

This is where the voice of reason comes in. Your voice of reason is a rather important one, it keeps you from making bad decisions. For example;

Voice of Crazy – “We should snort meth! Or inject it! Or eat it. Actually I have no idea how one goes about ingesting meth but we should still totally do it.”

Voice of Reason– “What are you talking about that is a TERRIBLE idea. No!”

See how quickly the nutty concepts were shut down? That’s what the Voice of Reason is for.

Tragically I have no Voice of Reason. It took a vacation with my common sense a couple of years back and has been AWOL ever since. I have only the Voice of Crazy and the Voice of Slightly Less Crazy.

So this is how last night went.

Voice of Crazy – “We narrowly escaped being decapitated by an alligator. But I can hear it outside the door. It’s sitting in the living room next to the clothes horse.”

Voice of Slightly Less Crazy– “Is it?”

Voice of Crazy– “Yes and now we’re going to have to pee into a cup because there’s no way we can leave the bedroom without being eaten alive.”

Voice of Slightly Less Crazy – “I’m not sure if urinating into a container is a good idea, besides there are no cups in here.”

Voice of Crazy– “That means only one thing. We’ll have to use Roscoe’s hat.”

Thankfully I have a bladder of steel so I was able to wait three hours until it was light out because light makes alligators evaporate. Although I did spend a good hour frozen in terror convinced that if I set one foot on the floor there would be a smaller alligator under my bed that would bite my foot off.

Here is a picture of the gator that inspired this whole event. I clipped it’s photo from the Globe and Mail a couple of weeks back to remind myself that…

Actually I have no idea what I wanted to remind myself of. To dream big? That there’s always a giant prehistoric monster lurking in rivers? To carry a harpoon gun everywhere?

The moral of the story is don’t pee into your spouse’s headwear. Or maybe it’s to not clip pictures from newspapers and use them as bookmarks.

I have no idea.

*Though my brain was able to create this image my dear cousin Candy** was responsible for photoshopping the picture of the alligator into my living room. She did this at a moment’s notice because she lives up to the stereotype of having a stripper name and a heart of gold.

** Names of photo shopping geniuses have been changed in the interest of protecting my sweet sweet and free connection to tech-y people who want to put their work on this blog.