Police: Mother mistakes daughter as intruder, shoots her

[tblue37]

116. Or when your lizard brain reacts in panic when you have been suddenly wakened from

a deep sleep and have not yet fully climbed back to consciousness. Heck, the shooter might still have had one foot in a dream that had just turned terrifying because the monster (human or otherwise) that had been chasing her had just gotten so close that she could actually hear his footsteps!

We are all so overworked and sleep deprived that even when our three (or more!) alarms go off we sometimes have trouble waking up enough even to remember what day it is, or whether it is early morning or early evening when we notice the weak light outside the window.

One summer evening, a Friday, I thought we were in danger of a tornado because I believed it was daytime but the sky did not look right. The light was all weird and "overcast," and it seemed oddly colored. That's because it was about 8:00 in the evening (daylight savings time), not 8:00 in the morning. IOW, I'd mistaken the light just before dusk for full morning light because I had just awakened from a nap after an exhausting week with far too much work and too little sleep.

The reason I thought "tornado" is that I live in Kansas, it was tornado season, and I had often seen weird sky/light right before dangerous storms, including those that spawned tornadoes.

Undoubtedly, if I were the sort of person who is scared enough of home invasions to always keep a loaded gun right by me while I sleep, I would, upon hearing footsteps rapidly approaching my bedroom, immediately jump to the "disaster" scenario that occupies the main spot in my fear (or at least my "be prepared!&quot geography. In my case, when faced with a weirdly lit sky, my lizard brain thought, "What must I do to protect myself from the imminent storm?" The "Oh, no! Home invasion--and they are right outside my bedroom!" mind would immediately jump to the defensive behavior she had always expected to have to resort to someday.

Yes, I do believe people who regularly keep a loaded gun by them while they sleep do so because they believe it likely that they *will* need to use it someday. In fact, I suspect that many of them have home invasion nightmares just as I have nightmares about situations that provoke anxiety in me--or those that have provoked my anxiety in the past.

So that is a real possibility--i.e., that the sound of the opening door as the daughter returned caused the mother's sleeping mind to slip into a home invasion dream, and the sound of rapid footsteps closing in on her provoked a defensive reaction, one she had mentally rehearsed both consciously and subconsciously, that was still halfway--or even more-- still part of the dream. And just as our dreams don't stick with us as we fully awaken, the mother might not even remember dreaming. She would remember only that moment of panic when she reacted to what *felt* like a terrifying home invasion.