Don't Blink

The average person spends approximately one-third of their life asleep.

Assuming you live to be seventy-eight, that's about twenty-six years spent unconscious. Twenty-six years during which the world continues without your participation. People come and go. Cars pass outside your house. The refrigerator hums. The pipes knock in the walls. And you have absolutely no idea.

That's not even counting the time you spend blinking.

You blink somewhere between fifteen and twenty times a minute. Each blink lasts only a fraction of a second. Long enough for the world to disappear, but not long enough for you to miss it.

Or so you assume.

Apparently, professional formula car drivers have to be careful about when they blink. At over 300 kilometers an hour, a single blink can mean traveling nearly twenty meters without seeing the road. Researchers have even found that drivers tend to blink at predictable points on a circuit, avoiding the more dangerous sections.

Think about that. Someone has actually studied when it's safe to close their eyes.

You, on the other hand, do it whenever you feel like it. While crossing the street. Walking down the stairs. Driving home. Sitting alone in your bedroom.

You don't even think about it.

And why would you? It's only a fraction of a second. You close your eyes, and then you open them again. Everything is where you left it. The room hasn't changed. The person across from you hasn't moved. Nothing could possibly have happened in that tiny little gap.

Probably.

There's a story about a man who became afraid of sleeping.

I heard it years ago, and I can't remember where. It might have been something someone told me at a party. Or something I read online. The details change depending on who's telling it, which is usually how you know a story has been around for a while.

Some versions say he lived alone. Others say he had a wife and children who eventually grew tired of his behavior. But they all agree on one thing: every night, before going to bed, he checked his house.

He checked the locks on the doors. Then the windows. He walked through every room, opened every closet, looked under every bed. He made sure the kitchen chairs were tucked in, the curtains were closed, and the lights were off.

Eventually, he started leaving certain objects in very specific places. A book on the corner of a table. A glass beside the kitchen sink. A chair pushed neatly under the dining table. He would memorize their positions before going to bed, so he could tell if anything had moved by morning.

At first, people thought he was just particular. Then they thought he was paranoid.

The story says that one night he woke to the sound of something falling downstairs.

He checked the time. A little after three.

He got out of bed and walked downstairs, careful not to turn on any lights. The house was quiet. The doors were locked. The windows were closed. Nothing seemed out of place.

Except for the kitchen chair.

It had been pulled away from the table.

He was certain he'd pushed it in before bed. He remembered doing it. He remembered checking the kitchen. He even remembered looking at that particular chair because he'd started paying attention to it.

He pushed it back under the table and went upstairs.

In the morning, his wife asked why he'd been in the kitchen during the night.

He told her about the chair.

She said it had been tucked under the table when she woke up.

He asked if she'd moved it.

She said no.

After that, he began checking the house twice. Then three times. He stopped sleeping with the bedroom door open. He started leaving lights on. Eventually, he would sit in the hallway for hours, watching the rooms he'd already checked.

People told him he was exhausted. That he was imagining things. That he needed to sleep.

Maybe they were right.

The story never says whether the chair really moved. Maybe he'd forgotten to push it in. Maybe his wife had moved it and forgotten. Maybe he'd dreamed the entire thing.

But I always found it interesting that he never seemed particularly afraid of what might have moved the chair.

He was afraid that it had moved without him knowing.

There's another thing people say about spiders. Apparently, they get used to the rhythms of a house. The vibrations of footsteps, the movement of furniture, the times when a room is occupied and when it's empty. Some people even claim that if you suddenly start finding spiders in places where you've never seen them before, it's because you've changed your routine.

I don't know how much of that is true. Spiders probably aren't nearly as interested in us as we'd like to imagine.

Still, I once found one above my bed.

It was small, almost directly above where my head would be on the pillow. I don't know how long it had been there. I remember staring at it for a while, wondering how many times I'd gone to bed without noticing it.

I'd look at that ceiling every night. I'd lain in that exact spot, sometimes for hours, staring at nothing in particular.

And yet there it was.

I got up, found something to reach it with, and dealt with it. I checked the corner afterward, just to make sure there weren't any others.

There weren't.

At least, I didn't see any.

I didn't think much about it until a few nights later, when I woke up in the middle of the night.

I don't remember what woke me. I just remember opening my eyes and seeing the bedroom door.

It was open.

Not wide. Just enough to leave a narrow strip of darkness between the door and its frame.

I stared at it for a moment, trying to remember whether I'd closed it before going to sleep. I usually did. I was fairly sure I had.

I turned on the bedside lamp.

Nothing. Just the hallway beyond the door, empty and quiet.

I got up, checked the lock on the front door, looked into the bathroom, and came back to bed. Before lying down, I pushed the bedroom door shut.

I remember hearing the latch click.

The next morning, it was closed.

I never found out whether I'd left it open. I probably had. I was tired, and people forget things. It isn't particularly difficult to imagine that I'd simply misremembered.

But sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I look at the door before I look at anything else.

I suppose that's how routines start.

You get so used to seeing the same things in the same places that you stop really looking at them. You know where the door is, where the window is, where your clothes are piled on the chair. You don't need to check every corner of your bedroom every time you walk into it.

You know your room.

At least, you know what it looks like when you're awake.

Have you ever woken up and heard something fall in another room? Or noticed a shadow in the corner that seems to disappear the moment you turn your head?

Maybe you've seen something that looks too much like a person standing beside the wardrobe. A movement near the ceiling. Something just beyond the edge of your vision.

You blink. You look again.

It's a coat. A pile of clothes. Nothing at all.

You tell yourself you were half asleep. That your eyes hadn't adjusted to the dark. That dreams sometimes follow you into the first few moments after waking.

And that's probably what happened.

But here's something I've always wondered.

What if you hadn't woken up?

What if you'd rolled over, pulled the covers up, and gone straight back to sleep? You would never have known whether there was anything there. You wouldn't have remembered the sound, or the movement, or the shape in the corner.

By morning, there would be no reason to think anything had happened.

That's the thing about sleeping. You don't experience the hours you spend unconscious. You experience going to bed, and then you experience waking up. Everything in between is something you have to assume.

The man in the story eventually stopped sleeping altogether.

Some versions say he would sit in his bedroom with the lights on, watching the furniture, the doors, the shadows. Others say he began to believe things were changing whenever he blinked. A chair would seem a little farther from the table. A door would be open when he was certain he'd closed it. Sometimes he thought he saw something move just beyond his field of vision.

People told him he was exhausted. That he was imagining things. That he needed to sleep.

Maybe they were right.

The story never says what happened to him. Some versions claim he died. Others say he eventually got better. My favorite version simply ends with someone asking him why he was so afraid.

And he says:

"Because I don't know what happens when I'm not here."

I think that's the part people misunderstand.

It's not really about what's hiding in the dark. It's not even about whether there's something in your room when you think you're alone.

It's about the chair.

It's about the door.

It's about all the little things you never think to question because you've always assumed they'd be there when you opened your eyes.

You can lock every door in your house. You can check every window, inspect every closet, and make sure there isn't a single thing out of place. You can memorize the exact position of every object in your bedroom.

But you can't watch all of it.

Eventually, you'll have to look away. You'll blink. You'll turn your back. You'll fall asleep.

Your body will keep breathing. Your heart will keep beating. The world will carry on.

You'll be there.

You just won't be watching.

And tomorrow morning, you'll wake up and assume everything is exactly as you left it.

Because it probably is.

Probably.

The average person spends about twenty-six years asleep.

And every day, they blink thousands of times. Fractions of a second, each one too brief to remember. If you added them all together, you'd be surprised how much of your life you've spent with your eyes closed.

You never thought much about it before.

You never had to.

You will lock your doors tonight. You'll check the windows, turn off the lights, and make sure everything is where it belongs.

You'll probably look around your bedroom one last time before getting into bed.

And then you'll close your eyes.

Not because you've decided that nothing will happen.

But because, eventually, you won't have a choice.