This first post has been extremely difficult for me to buckle down and create. It's not that I have any difficulty writing out my thoughts - quite the opposite, in fact.
I'm the type of person who keeps a virtual journal saved in an obscure part of my computer under a ridiculous name. And, lest someone stumbles across it, it contains no names and is written in prose style rather than the typical "dear diary."
Frankness; not one of my strengths.
I had a revelation a few weeks ago, that helped me to understand my grandmother's brain better. It was such a strange feeling... even after I'd realized my imagination had taken over my reality, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was going on.
Allow me to precede this story by explaining that my grandmother often needs to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Thus, I am quite used to waking up during the night, and am typically quite sensitive to strange sounds.
One night a few weeks ago, something awoke me around 5:am. I still don't know what it was, as when I got up to check the house (I have a saviour complex; I believe I could single handedly fend off a burglar), everyone was still asleep.
All I know for sure is that after I awoke, in those few seconds when you're still trying to figure out why you're awake, I distinctly heard the sound of the front door being discreetly opened & closed. Now, I used to work at Starbucks, so I would often make this very noise when trying to get to work at four in the morning - so I know it well. But as I already noted, when I got up to investigate, the other three residents in the house were fast asleep. Not only that, but the deadbolt was thrown (a sound which I hadn't heard).
It wasn't until I got back to bed that I was confident I had imagined the noise. You see, as I was crawling back under the covers, I remembered that before awaking I'd been dreaming a sequel to a dream I've had before (sadly, this isn't strange for me) - and while the dream in and of itself isn't important, I realized that the door opening and closing was just one of many fragments of my dream that I still felt were real. even as I was pulling my covers over myself, I would've sworn that my hands were still wet from ruffling a friend's freshly-showered hair.
The point of all this is that while I have the sanity-synapse working to tell me I'd imagined it all and that the door hadn't really been opened and my hand wasn't really wet, my grandmother doesn't. She has an over-active imagination (always has), but the part of her brain telling her that what she just saw/did or heard/said was just her imagination doesn't work anymore.
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