Was It Really a Dream?

I looked at the clock and it was a few minutes after 3:00. In the morning.

I had been wakened by a very rude noise. It was some sort of high pitched alarm-sounding type of sound. As best as I could remember it had played a short melody and then added three short high frequency bursts. The kind sure to wake the dead. If the dead could be woken.

It sounded like it had come from the other room, but with those high pitched sounds one can’t be sure, can one, they can fool you. Maybe the sound, or the alarm, or whatever it was, had come from outside.

Or maybe it was a dream.

You see, I’ve been having some very vivid, very realistic dreams lately. Not real type dreams, not the kind that one would mistake for reality, but the kind where when I wake up, I have to think for a moment, was that really a dream? Because it seemed so vivid and real.

Maybe that alarm was a dream.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

The thing is, just a few days earlier, I had had some workers come to check my boiler and radiators. They filled up the water and got the radiators working much more efficiently than they had been. All good. But while they were here, the one guy kept talking about carbon monoxide detectors, and did I have one?

Yes, and I pointed to it.

Oh, that’s pretty old, he said, after inspecting it. It’s not going to alert you until the monoxide is already at a deadly level. You need to get a newer model.

So I checked and added one to my Amazon shopping cart. (So much for cutting back on Amazon.)

Anyway, the point is that carbon monoxide and its detectors were on my mind. What if mine had just gone off?

But I didn’t smell anything. Of course not. Carbon monoxide is odorless. I wouldn’t smell anything until I was dead.

Maybe I better go and check.

But geez it was cold. The temperature outside was down around 11° F (that’s -12° C, which sounds more like what it felt like), and I don’t have the heat on at night so it was pretty cold inside too. I needed to put on my slippers and a robe. But I didn’t want to turn on a light because I didn’t want to wake myself up anymore than I had to, so I tried to put on my slippers in the dark.

Now I have two pairs of slippers sitting side by side that I use on alternate days. In the dark I ended up putting the wrong slipper on the wrong foot, so I had to turn the light on after all and really woke myself up.

Well, I got downstairs, holding my breath, and I looked at the carbon monoxide detector and it didn’t look like it just went off or anything. I gingerly took a breath and I didn’t feel light headed. I’m not sure how I would feel if the air was suffused with carbon monoxide. I think I’d turn blue, but how would I feel? In any case I did feel a little bit foolish, perhaps, but not light headed.