When I was three or four, I remember my folks watching some television show about wooden ships on the high seas. There were two ships and one guillotine. I think you can figure out the rest. Later in the same month there was a show of a man running through the woods turning into a werewolf during a full moon. After that it was a late night movie about a vampire.

As a little boy the guillotine troubled me, the werewolf had me scared, and the vampire absolutely terrified me. For children that age, we can not separate reality from non reality, they are one and the same. I doubt my folks were even aware of what had happened, but vampires fit right in, being more scary than the monster under the bed, or in the closet.

I spent nights into teenage years scared of vampires. As silly as it sounds, I became a stomach sleeper during these years in an attempt to protect my throat. When sleeping on my side I could not sleep unless I kept my neck covered with my hand(s). About fifteen, I had a two week every night, all night dream, a vampire hanging on the window next to my bed! For two weeks, it begged, threatened, intimidated, and did everything else it could do to gain permission to enter into my bedroom. Vampires do not exist? One did for those two weeks!

As quickly as it arrived, it left, and I was sleeping peacefully once again. Lucky for me I was starting to have a slight interest in the evening news, and I noticed there were never reports of vampires killing people. Same thing at the library, in the ‘modern’ times of the nineteen-sixties, vampires only existed in books and stories.

I had a decision to make. My logical mind knew there were no vampires, or anything like them that could harm me. On the other hand, they did exist in my life for the last eleven years, and they were very real, and quite deadly. Judging on the previous few weeks of nightmares, I had done something to attract one to my window, real or not.

Over the next months I purged vampires out of my life, and changed my sleeping habits to be something in line with my version of normal. It was not easy, but it had become apparent even at fifteen that I could not let that behavior continue. There always was the option that if I was wrong, I could bring back all my fears, and concerns about vampires, but that did not seem likely.

For the most part I became normal when I slept again. That was so many years ago, I had forgotten all about it, until I read a blog last week of someone going through their own personal hell. They have discovered they are trapped inside their house, and are struggling to find the courage to change their life.

Part of me understands this, and of course another part of me does not. If it were only easy to say, that behavior is easy to change. Behavior is hard to change, especially when it is ours. As I think back on my life, it is easy to understand. Habits I have started and dropped, some only after trying for years. Smoking is a good example. I quit four times before I finally stopped for good. Other habits were quite simple to modify, others not so easy.

I know for sure, as it applies to me, is the longer I allow a habit, the harder it is to modify. For some things, such as quitting smoking, it was the only goal in my life for a number of months. Nothing else in my day to day activities mattered as much as not picking up a cigarette.

Sometimes we take on habit to get through the day, sometimes a habit has a way of becoming our day. All I can offer is this, when a habit is no longer serves its purpose, it is easier to leave behind, because we no longer need whatever need it fills in our lives, as much as we need something else.