A friend recently told me that her daughter started sleepwalking again. How did she find this out? Only in the most terrifying way possible.
My friend woke up in the middle of the night and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. On her way back to bed, something in her home office caught her eye. Just a small movement in the shadows, but enough to make her pause.
As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw her desk chair slowly spinning . . . spinning . . . spinning . . . until her trance-like child rotated into view.
"What are you doing in there?" my friend asked. In response, her daughter stood up and walked calmly back to her bedroom.
What amazes me about this story is that my friend is, as of this writing, still alive (i.e., did not suffer a fatal heart attack because of this encounter).
I think this is because, even though you have to be prepared for anything when you have kids, you can also chalk a lot of creepy-ass stuff up to the fact that they're children. They're going to say crazy shit, and do freaky things (because they aren't yet old enough to know they're freaky), and they're not always able to distinguish dreams from reality.
But parents have an advantage, because if they hear a noise or see an apparition during the midnight hours, they can rest assured it's probably just their offspring being weirdos.
I, on the other hand, have no such handy explanation to comfort me. If I had wandered into a room and seen a chair spinning in the dark, the scene would have played out very differently.
COURTNEY: (Sees rotating piece of office furniture. Knows for a fact no other living beings are in her apartment. Says nothing. Soils self.)
End Scene.