Two nights ago, something really weird happened to me.  Generally speaking, I’m pretty easy to wake up when I’m sleeping.  It was about 3am and I was contently dreaming, when I was awakened by a female voice from the side of the bed that said my name.  Two things about the voice were that (a) it’s demeanor was exactly how you would expect when someone tries to wake you up in a nonemergency (not whispery or frantic, just plain and direct), and (b) it was a familiar voice.  Since it only spoke one word (my name), I couldn’t place whose voice it was, but it was immediately acknowledged in my brain that it was someone I know, or have known in the past.  It was so un-alarming and familiar that I just reacted as anyone would and said “what”.

As the fog lifted, it then started to occur to me that there really shouldn’t be someone speaking my name from the side of the bed in a dark bedroom at 3am.  When I rolled over to see what might be there, one of our dogs was patiently sitting there staring at me.  On rare occasions this dog will have a need to go out and pee in the middle of the night, but she would never just sit there and stare at me – she would whine, jump up and scratch her paws on the mattress while attempting to nuzzle me with her snotty wet nose.  Yet somehow I knew that she wanted to go outside, so I took her downstairs and let her out where she did her business, and we went straight back up to bed. 

In the morning, I told my girlfriend about this experience, who happened to be right there next to me in bed unconsciously asleep the whole time.  The more I thought about it, the creepier it was.  It was as if the dog was using a ghost to wake me up.  Or maybe the dog had hijacked my dream and used my subconscious to wake me up in a familiar voice rather than the usual way of annoying me to death.  It was just so weird that she was patiently sitting there rather than doing her frantic “I gotta pee” routine.  My lady and I laughed it off, but both thought that it was a bit beyond a normal experience.

The only other experience I have ever had with a ghostly encounter was many years back, when my kids were small.  I had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and when I left the bathroom I heard the door handle to my kids’ room jiggling.  Again, it was around 3am.  I flipped on the hallway light and saw the door handle moving around.  I thought to myself “I can’t believe this, what the hell are they doing up at 3am?”  I think my daughters were about 4 and 6 years old at the time.  I stepped to their door, grasped the doorknob, and the doorknob slid to a stop in my hand.  I turned the handle and opened the door, only to see my oldest daughter sitting up in bed on the other side of the room, starring at the doorway with the sheets pulled up to her nose.  My youngest was completely asleep in her bed, and there’s no way that the oldest one could have been on the other side of the doorknob and returned to bed on the other side of the room in the split second it took to open the door.  I asked her why she was awake and she said she heard something that woke her up.  Who knows what the hell was messing with the doorknob, but it stopped and we just went back to bed.