Last night

I went to bed early last night to be in bed with my girlfriend. She wanted to cuddle some before leaving town for a few days. I agreed and forced myself to fall asleep way before my normal bedtime. Why is this important you are beginning to ask yourself. It's important because whenever I sleep too much, as I had done the night before, and then force myself to fall asleep early again the following night, I have terrible dreams and wake up in terror sometimes.

So last night I woke up to a man standing in my room no more than three feet from my head. I opened my eyes and saw him standing there with straw for hair and very crooked teeth. His face was looking directly at me and I quickly shot my arm over to where my lamp was an flicked it on. Of course nothing was actually in my room but so help me Jesus I thought I was waking up to a scarecrow in my room.

This has made me think of a friend who used to live on the East Coast. He has told me that in the house he grew up in, he would often wake from sleep standing straight up and the foot of his own bed. This left me with a sick pit in my stomach envisioning him as a child with the sheets on his bed torn about from terrible feelings of paranoia and waking up slowly to the realization that you are not in your own bed, but standing at the foot of it. Sleep standing.
He also told me that the alarm clock radio next to his bed used to make screeching noises randomly in the middle of the night. He would wake to something screaming bloody murder and then have to act like everything in the room was cool and he was not freaked out at all. His dreams were nothing but freaky as well. At the moment I cannot recall a specific dream he told me about but they all involved his own death or someone in his family dying. Then he'd wake at the foot of his bed.