Ghost Nap

Well, I decided to take a nap. And I was like, "I sure wish I had something to read while I drift off to sleep." You see, I'm reading a biography of Tom Stoppard right now, but it is too bulky for napping purposes. There is no way to get comfortable with it. Also, the last thing I read in it was the phrase "Her poems are moist and pulsating," which I suppose was meant to be a compliment, but filled me with a Cronenbergian sense of horror no doubt unintended by the author. So I checked out the bookcase next to my side of the bed and found an academic treatise on ghost sightings, which provided just what I was looking for, filled as it was with deadpan sentences of the type I enjoy, such as, "The obvious explanation for headless ghosts is that they represent those who had their heads chopped off." A few pages later, there is a quotation from an 18th-century man who thought he saw a ghost: "I perceived my hair to heave my hat from my head, and my teeth to chatter in my mouth." That gave me a chuckle! A hat popping off a head in fright was something I might have associated with the capering of Stan Laurel, but I never before read a claim that it had happened to an actual person in real life. Soothed by such imagery, I fell into a dreamless slumber.