The Mysterious Beeping Noise

This morning I woke up and realized that an alarm had been going off for a while. It stopped, and a while later, started again. It sounded kind of like the carbon monoxide alarms that just go off by accident sometimes in my house. I looked at my clock: it was around 5:30. I heard out in the hall my mom saying something about carbon monoxide, and I'm thinking that perhaps the alarm (which has stopped by now) is one of our carbon monoxide alarms.

The funny thing is that instead of just going "meep! meep! meep!" like our carbon monoxide alarm, it's doing a "dee-dee! dee-dee! dee-dee!" as if there are two alarms slightly offset from each other. Now why would it be that both our carbon monoxide alarms would go crazy at the same time, unless there really was carbon monoxide in the house?

However, I knew that if there really was a problem, my parents would have woken us up and gotten us out of the house. Still, I wanted to just go downstairs and ask my mom what was going on so I could sleep in peace. But I was so tired, plus getting out of bed now would make me even more tired when it was actually time to get up. Meanwhile, the alarms were starting and stopping.

I thought about what I had learned in chemistry class about how carbon monoxide kills you: it's shape is similar to oxygen so the things that cary oxygen to your cells pick it up. But your cells refuse to take it and you can't pick up more oxygen because you can't get rid of the carbon monoxide and you have no oxygen!!!!!!!

Deciding I was too tired to get up, I thought about how I already knew that if I went downstairs and asked my mom what was going on she would have some reasonable answer. I decided to just pretend I knew what that reasonable answer was and just go to sleep.

Unfortunately for me, my subconcious is not so good at being rational. As I drifted into sleep I had a dream in which I went downstairs to find that my parents were neglecting the fact that our house was filling up with carbon monoxide. I woke up and realized that was silly. Then I went back to sleep and had another dream of the same nature. This time I went outside to breathe the fresh air. Outside was a wierd Dr Seuss combined with Teletubbies world with almost neon green grass and small yellow houses with roofs that looked like submarines.

I woke up, and before I was finished waking up I felt like I couldn't breathe properly because I was in that wierd stage where I was only partly aware of myself. Naturally, I jolted awake with the fear that I was breating carbon monoxide!

At this point I felt there was no way to get a good rest-of-my-sleep unless I found out the truth. So, I went downstairs and asked my mom what the alarm was. She told me it was three connected smoke-detectors in the basement that were detecting dust inside them, but that they were fixed now. This turned out to be wrong--they beeped one last time that morning before I finally fell asleep.

-Rebecca