Nostalgic Moment #23 (Mystery #2)

Since I've already included one Frankie Cole Mystery on my blog and also since March is typically a month for horror (March Madness without the Wildcats, Julius Caesar's murder on the Ides of March and tiny minions running around rainbows and pinching people,) I felt the desire to include another unsolved mystery from my past. Here I go...

One night when I was in High School I woke up from my sleep after suffering a pretty rough nightmare. I can't recall exactly what it was about, but I'm pretty sure my Mamaw was there running around and the house was flooding... scary! As I lay there gathering my wits and trying desperately to calm my nerves I came to the realization that I was quite chilly. When I went to get all warm and cozy under my blankets I immediately noticed that they were missing from my bed. And not just my blankets, but also my sheets, including the fitted sheet, and my pillow and pillow case were all missing. I'm typically a rough sleeper and this had happened on more than one occasion, so I hopped off my bed to look for my covers on the floor. They weren't there. In fact they weren't anywhere in my room. Not in my closet, not under the bed. No where. This was very puzzling and I started to question whether or not I even went to bed with any of my covers in the first place. Of course, that was silly, if I'm not a good sleeper with a nice soft, completely covered bed, I'm a downright insomniac without covers. So, I wandered out into the hallway to search for them, but they weren't in the hallway either. Not in my bathroom, not in my brother's room. What was going on?

After fifteen minutes of solid searching, I was completely baffled. Finally, I surrendered, went back to my room, pulled an old comforter out of my closet and went back to sleep. That next morning, my mom appeared in my doorway asking why all of my covers were in her bathroom. That didn't make any sense and you're probably wondering why, but allow me to explain the dangers of entering my parents bedroom once they were asleep. If I'm psychotic with my dreaming, it's only because I learned it from my mother. Don't even get me started on some of the things she's done throughout the years. To give you just a sampling; there was the time she purred loudly like a cat because she thought there was a mouse in the closet, there was the time she squared off with an imaginary intruder that had appeared in our house and scared the living daylights out of me and my sister, not to mention literally hundreds of times when she would lurch, zombie-like into our bedrooms and hover over us while we tried to keep our eyes closed and pretend we were sleeping because we were scared out of our minds. No, even in my deepest sleep I never dared enter the no-fly zone of my parent's bedroom. It was literally a suicide mission and mom could be out of her bed and barreling down upon you screaming like a banshee within seconds and she was a dead eye with a shoe. Sorry mom! I know I'll hear about this one for sure.

So there in lies the question: How did my covers end up in her bathroom? Did I actually brave her bedroom and do it myself? Or did she, during her comatose rounds, strip the covers out from underneath me? My dad actually thinks that at some point during that night my mother and I made a silent exchange. That she met me half way and there was a hand-off of sorts. No one knows for sure, but I did receive somewhat of a revelation about 2 months later.

I can remember stirring in my sleep, but not waking up completely in the middle of the night. Something was bothering me, maybe a bad dream, maybe too much Burger King, but I can't remember. What I do remember is that I felt the sudden urge to remove all of my covers from my bed and take them down the hallway to drop on the family room couch. I then stumbled back to bed and drifted back to sleep completely. An hour or so later I woke up and gasped. All of my covers were gone! Not again! But then I remembered what I had done.

Maybe that solved the mystery. Maybe it had been me all along. Maybe my mother was innocent and I was the only guilty party. That seems like a reasonable conclusion, but I'm not convinced yet. Because maybe just maybe, there was going to be another exchange and somehow, something went wrong. Maybe my mother was intercepted by the dream police before she made it to the drop-off location. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Until there's verifiable proof, this mystery will remain unsolved...