The Night Reality Slipped

True confessions from a young child facing their worst fear

Lex E. Santí, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC

It was 1987, and I woke up in the dark to something crawling over me. Dazed I rubbed my eyes and pulled back the sleeping bag. I heard screeching.

I don't remember having awoken to screeching like this in the last 40 years. This type of screeching landed in my chest before it reached my ears. I was a teenager and something was moving in the living room of Jesse Winter's house the night that I watched Aliens. I sat there in the sleeping bag, frozen. I remember being absolutely quiet, hoping the sound would go away. It didn't. I looked at the TV in the corner of the room, the VHS tape of Aliens was returned to the box, but the TV was off. The only light came from the street light across the street. I heard the sound again. I got up, out of that bed and grabbed a baseball bat.

For those who haven't seen Aliens, the horror of that movie is not the moment of attack. It's the quiet before it. The sense that something is already in the room, already on you, already moving across your chest — and nobody else knows. The xenomorph doesn't knock. It doesn't announce itself. One moment the world is ordinary. The next, something explodes out of someone's stomach, and everyone is screaming, and nothing is ever the same again.

I was maybe twelve, and earlier in the evening I had watched that movie with Pudgie's Pizza and soda's. I remember the chests exploding, the alien running around the room jumping but most of all I remember the sound the alien made. And now, in that room, something was screeching in the living room, and I was certain — the way you are only certain of things at that age, in the dark, alone — that I was the only one awake and that thing was an alien. Was everyone around me was already gone? Was I already infected? I knew that whatever was happening was happening to me and only me, and the question was not whether it was real, but whether I could survive it.

· · ·

Here is what I did: I got up.

I walked around the room. I poked at my friends in their sleeping bags, trying to rouse someone, anyone. The screeching moved. First from one corner, then from somewhere else, then from behind the couch. I followed it. I couldn't stop following it. The logic was not: get back in your sleeping bag and wait for morning. The logic was: keep moving. Keep checking. Don't let it come to you. I couldn't wake anyone up and in truth, I was scared to do so. I must have been wearing pajamas. I hadn't gone to many sleepovers. This was the first year after my parents divorced, and Jesse's birthday.

Eventually, it became too much. I don't know how long, but my nerves got to me. I was battling my nerves in the dark. I walked up the stairs. I ended up in Jesse's father's office. His father was a minister — a good man, a steady man, the kind of man whose presence in a room makes the room feel a little more governed. He had a rotary phone on his desk. I dialed my mother's number. It was two in the morning.

She answered.

I don't remember exactly what I said. Something about the noise. Something about needing to come home. She didn't argue, didn't make me explain myself. She arranged to pick me up. Jesse's father woke to the sound of someone upstairs, came to find me, and walked me across the street. We stood together under a streetlight, him and me, waiting. I don't remember him saying anything. He just stood there, which was exactly the right thing.

· · ·

My mother thought the real issue was the divorce.

She wasn't exactly wrong. Six months before that night, we had moved from our house on East State Street — a corner house in that part of Ithaca that felt like it belonged to a certain kind of life, professors and families, the intellectual hum of a small city that knew itself — to a two-bedroom apartment where I shared bunk beds with my sister. The world had already come apart once. My nervous system was already on alert. She suggested I see a therapist. I went.

But I want to say something about that night, about what I did in that living room. Because I've thought about it for years now — thought about it differently as a clinician than I did as a kid, but thought about it nonetheless.

I froze at first, but I didn't curl back into my sleeping bag and pull the zipper over my face and wait for it to be over. I got up, found a bat! And I walked the perimeter of the room, found the phone, and made the call. And then, the next morning — and this is the part that matters — I went to our baseball practice the next day

· · ·

It was Little League, red/purple Kiwanis shirts. Todd Kathan was there. Dan DiSalvo was there. Jesse Winter was there — Jesse, who I am still in touch with today, whose father had sheltered me under a streetlight at two in the morning without making me feel strange about it. Jesse is an amazing photographer and graceful human; you should check out his website.

We were standing around before practice, doing what kids do before practice, which is nothing in particular, when Todd said: You'll never guess what happened. He looked at Dan and then me, "Jesse's hamsters got out in the middle of the night! This morning we had to find them."

Jesse Winter (top middle) Lex Santí (top right) photo from Jesse Winter.

The hamsters. They were hamsters.

I stood there in my shirt on that baseball field and felt the world reassemble around me. The horror had been real. The screeching, the sense of something moving in the dark — all of it, real. The hamsters had gotten out of their cage in the night and were running along the baseboards and behind the furniture, screeching and skittering through Jesse's living room while six kids slept on the floor.

The stuff of nightmares was hamsters.

· · ·

I've told this story as a funny story for most of my life. And it is funny. But I am also a therapist now, and I sit with people whose worlds have gone sideways, and I think about that living room more than I ever expected to.

Because what I did that night was not nothing. It was not obvious. Six other kids slept through it. I was the one who got up. What I spend a fair amount of time thinking about is this: what if I had never been told it was the hamsters? I certainly don't remember the hamsters, and I don't remember going over to Jesse's house after that. There is magic in the unexplained and the unexplored recesses of our imagination and life, but in that night, I was in a waking nightmare, and when I woke--after not too much time of thinking of what it meant, I had an answer that explained it logically.

Sanity is not the absence of fear. I was terrified. Sanity is what you do with your feet when you're terrified. It's walking the perimeter. It's finding the rotary phone in the minister's office. It's standing under a streetlight at two in the morning and trusting that someone will come.

· · ·

You've had your version of this night. I know you have.

The one where the world went sideways — not gently, not with warning — but in the middle of the night, while you were lying on the floor and the screeching started and you couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Maybe it was a diagnosis. A call. A thing someone said that rearranged everything. Maybe it was smaller and harder to name: a sense that something had shifted, that the ground underfoot had changed key.

The question was never whether the monsters were real. The question was what you did next.

Did you get up and walk the room? Did you find the phone? Did you stand under a streetlight with someone and wait?

And did you go to practice the next morning, and stand in the sun, and listen — really listen — when someone told you it was hamsters?

Because that's what surviving looks like, most of the time. Not heroic. Not clean. Just present enough, and awake enough, and willing enough to keep walking until you understand what made the noise.

Little Lex and his baseball team way before this happened, Lex Santí far right.