Unconventional Bedtime Stories

We love stories. Nothing is more important to understand about human nature, and while I’m not a sociologist, an anthropologist, or a psychologist, you don’t have to be a learned student of human nature to know this. You just have to be you, and talk to people, and listen to people. It becomes very clear, very quickly, that we love to tell stories. We tell stories to inform people, about our wants and needs, about our history. We tell stories to entertain and to educate. We tell stories because, in my opinion, we are simply wired to do so.

Bedtime stories are no exception. I’m sure people pick them and use them for many different reasons. Some, maybe even most, want to lull a child asleep. Many have some sort of lesson to be learned by rote, hearing it night after night. Others are simply entertaining, making us laugh or even cry, sparking our imaginations and our emotions. And, like a nursery rhyme or a marketing jingle, these stories get stuck in our minds, intertwining with memory in ways that stay with us throughout our lives. Most even do all of these things, and as adults people can speak deeply about their childhood experiences with these narratives.

And yet some of us, surprisingly, never experience these stories. For whatever reason, as we lay down to sleep as children, no story is told. This can be for many reasons, admittedly some of them sad, but for me, it simply wasn’t a thing. I was and am loved. I have no doubt about that, so there isn’t a depressing reason why I never had bedtime stories presented to me. If I had to guess, it is likely because I sleep with immediacy and depth so much so that a story to lull me to sleep would be futile.

All that said, my childhood did have a form of bedtime stories. But they were very unconventional. The best way to describe it would be to share the memory. It’s a bit foggy with age, but bear with me.

I was at my grandparents’ house and staying the night with my sister and a cousin, both older than I, and as my younger sister wasn’t in the picture yet I would guess I was somewhere around 8 years old. Pretty tender age right? I was laying down on the divan in the front room of the house, one of those old timey lumpy but comfy ones with a pattern that was at once horrid and classic. My sister was 3 years older than I, and my cousin was about the same, and I’m sure for them I was a bit of a third wheel on what always seemed to be more a sleepover for them than just being watched by Grandma and Grandpa. They were on the floor, stomach down but up on elbows looking at the TV intently. Finally in the room was my Grandpa, sitting in his recliner with a fresh popped bowl of popcorn and laughing merrily at the “cartoons” even as I was at times hiding my face in couch cushions, more often than the girls shrieked or cackled.

What were we watching? What was my bedtime story that night as my Grandma slept in the other room and my sister and cousin begged my Grandpa to watch?

C.H.U.D.

If you’re not familiar, it stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. You can guess at the plot. I was terrified, and I had nightmares for weeks. I remember that I wouldn’t go into my grandparent’s basement for a while, because all basements were connected by an underground that the Dwellers came from, at least that’s how I remember it. It was, at least in my memory, surreal, seeing the awfulness unfolding on the screen as I tried to shield myself, as my sister and cousin were giggling and gasping at the most graphic parts even while at the same time my Grandpa alternated between chuckles and all out belly laughs. And I realize now as an adult, I loved it.

And that wasn’t the end of it. Much to the chagrin of my mom, if she knew at the time (sorry mom), I saw lots of movies as a child that, well, a child shouldn’t. My dad introduced us to Apocalypse Now and Predator. With Grandpa we walked on Elm Street and stayed at Camp Crystal Lake. When my little sister came along we discovered that she loved Tremors, which was often watched multiple nights in a row. In the public library I discovered Lovecraft, and then even my mom jumped in pulling me into Anne Rice and Michael Crighton. All this before I even reached my teens.

Even today my older sister and I love horror. She’ll tell you that she watches Shudder and the sometimes more terrifying ID channel late at night when she can’t sleep, and instantly makes time for any found footage flick she learns about. I read horror and play horror video games and tabletop games and even watch horror themed Youtube videos as I pleasantly doze off on the couch most nights, and sometimes even for the odd daytime nap.

Okay so yeah, some people might think it was a poor move to subject us to that level of horror at that age, but they are stories. Cartoons as my Grandpa would say, and while my family weren’t much for bedtime stories, we loved our movies and TV, and the one thing they did well was teach us the difference between fantasy and reality. Between the story, and real life. I feel that did a lot to balance us as people, regardless of how we may have responded to it at the time. So yes, while it might be a little odd for people to share a movie theater with me or my sister, or God forbid both of us, and experience our cackles and howls of laughter when the Alien bursts out of a spacer’s chest or the ghost pulls jump scare after jump scare, we can’t help it. It’s fun. It’s a story, and for us, a comfortable friend. Our childhood bedtime story.

Because of all this, I find myself now as an adult being drawn to unconventional bedtime stories like Cliffourd the Big Red God or The Antarctic Express, and if I had children I would try to expose them to as much as I could, while all the time remembering, and teaching them that stories are just that.