Naked at Night

I admit it. I do wear pajamas when it is cold. But I sleep best when it is cool and I am naked.

But one of the hard parts about being a closet nudist, only naked in complete privacy, preferably in the back of the closet, sleeping naked can also be hard on the old PTSD.

More than once I awoke in the middle of the night naked and paralyzed in fear. Before I got married, it was almost a monthly thing. I would wake up, feeling a presence in the room, a presence that would terrify me. And I was in a state of completely un-armored nakedness. Naked to fangs, claws, and knives. Of course, the intruder was never real, only a phantom created by too much cortisol in the bloodstream due to stress and the horrors of the assault I endured as a child.

One night my two sisters, my wife, my oldest son, my niece and nephew were all sleeping in the farmhouse in Iowa which, on a temporary basis, was empty of everything even furniture as my grandmother lived in the retirement apartments and my parents stayed with her as they still lived in Texas. We were all there on a summer holiday visit. in the early 90s.

In the middle of the night, I got out of my sleeping bag to pee in the nearest bathroom, putting my robe on so as not to accidentally moon anybody. I went to the bathroom, and looked up at the window above the shower. There was a small, alien being staring at my berobed nakedness. I jumped out of my robe and ended up stark naked in the kitchen. I looked out the kitchen windows and saw the alien, or another one like it, walking across the yard under the yard light. It was green and as naked as I was.

Of course, I didn’t believe it was real. I was used to phantoms waking me up to paralyzed terror. Only, I wasn’t paralyzed. And I am pretty sure I wasn’t asleep.

Of course, I didn’t tell anybody, because they would tell me I was crazy, and I would believe them. So, I spent the rest of the night completely zipped up and trembling in my sleeping bag. If anybody was abducted and probed that night, their memories of it must’ve been completely erased. Mine too, probably.

The next night I had an elaborate dream. I dreamed that the aliens returned and were tapping at the windows, calling me outside to show me something. Uncharacteristically, I got up, completely naked, and went outside. In the dark, looking out above the machine shed and the eastern cornfield, the planet Jupiter completely filled the sky. I couldn’t believe it. I knew from having taught the subject in school that being that close to Jupiter’s gravity, the Earth would be mangled and turned into a volcanic mess like the moon of Jupiter called Io.

So, the third night, I took matters into my own hands. After everybody else in the empty farmhouse was asleep, I got up and put on my robe. I went out the back door of the house. And then I dropped my robe and preceded out to the hill in the yard overlooking the eastern cornfield. The same place where I saw the planet Jupiter in my dream. The star-filled sky was absolutely absorbing in its inherent beauty. In the country in Iowa, far away from city lights, and with no clouds in the sky, it was all the very substance that God is made of. I saw the twinkling stars. I saw the red-tinged light that was Jupiter, and the other one that was Mars. I saw the glittering path of the Milky Way’s spilled milk. The fear was gone. I was naked and completely connected to the universe. It is one of those moments in a life that came unexpectedly, but became a fundamental keystone to all the experiences of my life.