A Mouse Falling Into My Mouth While I Sleep

I know this sounds ridiculous, and this is the most serious of my fears that people make fun of me for, but I assure you I am 100% serious when I say this has caused me many sleepless nights when ever I hear the pitter-patter of disgusting little feet around the apartment.

BACKGROUND
I am afraid of a mouse falling into my mouth while I sleep and curling up and falling asleep itself. Now, I say falling because the origins of this fear stem back to a basement apartment I shared with two close friends from September 2006 to September 2007. This was our fourth year of university and for me personally, not a great year. I was nervous about graduating and not knowing what to do next (there will be a post at some point about my fear of the future) and I was compensating by drinking. A lot. One of my roommates, for whatever his reasons was also drinking quite a bit. The third was simply flat out the dirtiest fucker I've ever known. A good friend, but the single worst roommate I've ever had. One of the more notable features of the apartment was the four foot long, two foot deep hole in my bedroom wall. It was meant for storage, according the landlord, but was quite literally a former window that had plywood placed around it with a piece of insulation on top that, if removed, would have been an open hole out to the backyard.*

Anyway, the place was a mess. I did my best to keep it clean, but failed due to all the drinking. There were cases upon cases of empties everywhere, and the messy roommate had a weird habit of stuffing his used napkins/tissues in between the couch cushions.** The place wasn't the cleanest place in the world, and while we were not overrun by mice, we certainly had some. Much to the chagrin of my roommate's girlfriend, we managed to kill most of them. Every once in a while though, they would come back and run around the place, avoiding our death traps like trained special ops.

Sometimes, while I was never certain, I thought I heard them running around in that hole. It'd be perfectly reasonable for them to be in there, just squeeze through from the backyard. Mice search out the warmest place possible, especially when they're looking to sleep, which is why you see so many in the streets in the summer and so many in your apartment when it starts getting cold.

I'm an idiot, and I placed my bed directly under this hole. One night when I was half drunk I heard a mouse and the thought popped into my head that if I was like, pass-out drunk (which was fairly frequent) a mouse could jump out of that hole, crawl around my bed and crawl into my mouth, which we all know is on average a toasty 98.6 F and logically even more desirable than room temperature for a mouse, and fall asleep and I would never know. I would wake up in the

morning in a hungover stupor and this mouse would jump out of my mouth and I would have no idea what to do.

WHY IT IS A SCARY THING

By this point the numerous diseases the mouse carries would have made their way down my throat via my saliva and would have already been well on their way to killing me. Plus, I would have no way of knowing if the mouse was pregnant and decided to crawl down my throat to birth its babies in my warm tummy. Keep in mind that mice are freaks and they can shift the bones in their skull in order to crawl through a space the size of a dime, making them pretty much able to go any where they want.

In a situation like this I would have no idea what to do. What do you do if you wake up with a mouse in your mouth? You fucking panic! There is nothing else that could be done. One, the mouse is probably going to evade capture, so you therefore can't seek out revenge for the way it wronged you. Two, I don't think there is a shot that you can get from the doctor to just cure you of mouse diseases. Now, I could be wrong and mice could be less diseased than I think they are, but I don't think so. So really, the only thing you can do is die a slow and painful death from the inside out as the mouse diseases/babies tear away at your insides like that scene in the Itchy and Scratchy Fantasia parody. And even if you survive this...I don't think it's worth surviving. I would kill myself. I would never be able to put another thing in my mouth again, because that'd basically be the same as eating off a plate made of rats.

Another possibility is that the mouse could crawl into the confines of my stomach in search of further warmth and comfort and then die due to the inhabitable nature of the human stomach. Just imagine a week later when I poop out a mouse skull! Being a vegetarian, pooping out a skull would be generally confusing, but seeing an identifiable skull in my stool would send me into a panic about what the remaining bones could possibly be doing to the rest of my insides. How did it get there? What have I been doing either in my sleep or in my black out drunkenness? What have the dark recesses of mind mind decided what was appropriate when I lacked consciousness? Again, I wouldn't know what to do.

I think this is why it really scares me. In most situations, I'm confident I would be able to eventually figure out what to do, or at least what to expect if there is no action that can be taken. But not here, man. Not here. I'd be lost in a diseased panic.

Of course, this is all predicated on the idea that the mouse sleeping in my mouth doesn't choke me while I sleep and I do actually wake up from it. That'd be a pretty embarrassing way to go, choking on a mouse in your sleep. Mother would be devastated and confused.

PREVENTION

The only way to prevent this is to either start breathing through my nose when I sleep (impossible) or sleep with my face buried in my pillow and risk suffocating every night. I risk suffocating every night because the alternative scares the shit out of me.

CONCLUSION

This is a completely reasonable fear. It seems logically possible that it could happen, and the consequences of it happening range from mind-blowing, life-changing confusion to actual death and it is reasonable to be afraid of anything that causes death.

It is true that I haven't lived in that apartment for a long time, so this shouldn't really be an issue. But honestly, a quick Google search of “the powers of mice” shows that mice can get to any where they want. Just cause I don't have a hole above me anymore does not mean that they can't crawl up my bed posts or chew a hole in the ceiling of my current bedroom and jump down like a kamikaze pilot in search of the sweet sweet warmth of a human mouth.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but just ask yourself this question: What would you do if you woke up with a mouse in your mouth? You don't have an answer.

NOTES

* We were desperate for a place, and we kind of had to take this one. Surprisingly, the hole in the wall was one of the better things about this apartment. That year and that building provided some of the better/weirder stories I can tell. If you are in Toronto, you can take a walk down Ulster St near Bathurst and find the building that looks not unlike a spaceship to get a sense of how insane and poorly skilled at handy work the landlord was.

** He still does this. He's, like, 26 years old.