Dawn turned on to her side and hauled the duvet over her shoulder and surrendered into the mattress, relishing the warmth and the cocoon of security, the sigh-inducing loveliness of letting go. There are few luxuries to match it.
Her daytime mind began to dissolve. Where it goes to I cannot tell you, but let's just say it sleeps. And its place at the helm is taken by a far older mind, a mind that is bound by no restraints of reason, a mind that dreams and imagines and creates. It is this mind that makes the great discoveries of the world, the leaps of intuition that the daytime mind then takes and codifies and uses. Without the intuitive mind there would be no fresh ideas, no art, no dreams. But it's an anarchic beast, so the waking mind suppresses it. Only in the darkness of sleep is it let out to buck and whinny, to make a different universe of the dull diurnal world.
But just as Dawn drifted towards this different mental landscape the noise came again. Instantly Dawn was the opposite of sleepy. Blind in the darkness she stared towards the source, the other side of the bedroom wall. Her ears strained in the same direction. She was stretched as taut as piano wire, governed by the third and oldest of our minds, the mind that runs on simple instinct, that is concerned for nothing but survival.
When the noise came again that mind identified it instantly and irreversibly. It was the waking nightmare, the one we have when we are alone, out of earshot, away from love. Dawn felt a sickening physical fear. Images rose unbidden in her head, images that scared her when she was a girl, that had stayed in her skull all this time awaiting their moment. And their moment was now. There was someone in the next room. No, there was a man in the next room.
If she had not been alone there would have been no problem. Even if there had been only a child to look after she would have had something to defuse the fear. But there wasn't. There was only her and the scraping noise in a house that was suddenly violated.
The instinctual mind said flee. But how to flee? Her cellphone was beside the bed. She seized it, slid out of bed, dashed to the bathroom, shut the door, locked it, leant her back against it and for the first time in her life dialled 111.
The dispatcher kept her on the phone for however many minutes it took the police to arrive. From the bathroom she could not hear the intruder. When the dispatcher told her a policeman and dog had arrived at the house she opened the bathroom door and ran.
It didn't take long to find the intruder. The stray cat must somehow have got into the house during the day and then become trapped in the spare bedroom. And though the policeman was terribly kind about it, Dawn's daytime mind had never in her life been so embarrassed.
Yet even as she cringed, her older mind was patting her on the back and saying, "That's my girl". And silently her dreaming mind was waiting for the chance to turn the whole thing into something rich and strange and truer than the truth.