The Beast is Back!

At 4:26 AM this morning, I was awoken from an ultra-deep sleep by a violent and heavy pomelling on the base of my neck. As I am the only person in the castle, it was extraordinarily alarming. Who was doing this? Somebody else was there right behind me.

When a real-world stimulus stirs us out of deep sleep, the sensation is a painful and an almost nauseous wrench. I think we actually do make that final hard decision to force ourself into consciousness i.e. these awakenings are not instantaneous.

I worked out fairly quickly still without waking that this out-of-dream stimulus was probably Ko-Ko the polecat, and that I should really take action before I get bitten, which is the step that has previously followed a pommelling with her front paws. I pushed my back in the direction of the sensation to get Ko-Ko off my bed. However, I suspect in the time it took me to wake up, she had already run off.

I was left contemplating my life rather too deeply, such was the feverish existential state I was in.

Anyhow, Ko-Ko was a regular feature of the castle in 2024. You would see her running about generally warily and swiftly, but she did approach humans on occasion. In November of 2024, after a run of sleeping in my bed, she eventually embedded her fangs deeply into my nose in the middle of the night. I screamed like I had never screamed before and bled like I had never bled before. After this, she went into hiding ...

The interaction last night had the same "playful" dynamic: pushing someone to get a reaction out of them.

Anyhow, my smart watch shows the moment of the "wake up" and the fact it came unusually from deep sleep. Normally we go up and down the levels of sleep step-by-step as you can see from my (brief) 6:30 AM wake-up on the right.