insomnia's revenge - the awakening

It's four-thirty in the morning the night before the day I'm going to post this, or the morning of, if you're a bit of a pedant.
I've just been downstairs to make a cup of tea and stare glazed around the kitchen cursing my restlessness when I found myself drawn against my will to the flat black pools of the windows which overlook the garden.
I've said it before and will happily keep saying it until someone physically restrains me, there is something sinister about the middle of the night. On Sunday I woke up at three o'clock in the morning, paddling against the restraint of my covers and wondering why I could only see things in black and white.
" I'm colour-blind!" I screamed inwardly "I can only see in monochrome!"
A know plenty of people who get 'face at the window' syndrome - anyone who has watched a horror film from the eighties or early nineties will have some measure of this - when all you see is the spectre of your reflection peering back at you and somewhere out there, in the dark and the depths of the night the killer is prowling, stalking, knife glinting in hand, your eyes wander restlessly over the - ah Jesus! there he is, pressed flat against the glass.
The looming face at the porthole of your fears.
I spent at least five of my teenage years in a state of painful anxiety after being told by a 'psychic' that I was going to start seeing ghosts and that the first one would appear to me over my shoulder in my reflection. Thanks for that. I was a staggeringly insecure adolescent - as if there is any other kind - and would have happily spent hours staring into hostile mirrors and mentally pulling my image apart. Catching my own reflection became a terrifying ordeal, not only having to contend with the unhappy symmetry of my features but potentially the wispy face of a phantom hovering about the place, suggesting ways I could improve my hair. Whether I believe in ghosts or not, her words always, always come back to haunt me in these dark times, these alone-in-the-bowels-of-the-night times, when all I see out of the exposed kitchen windows is my own pale face, nervous and wide eyed, not just because of the roaming killer about to slam himself up against the glass but because the faces of the dead are about to loom up in the behind me as well.
It’s not as if I encourage meddling with the afterlife, I’m going to be seeing enough of it when I’m dead.