It was a DARK and stormy night. Specifically, it was a dark and stormy Wednesday night. I know this because when I pried my eyelids apart the next day, it was a dark and stormy Thursday morning. As is my wont on mornings like this, I took a few moments to shake my fist at the sky. " Damn you, Channel 7 Weather Center! Damn you to hell! " I don’t know why I was so cranky — I’d managed a good 15 minutes of uninterrupted sleep.

I hate night storms; they scare me. And this wasn’t just any old storm, either. This was one of those storms where the weather gods seem to be running a check on their various spooky sound effects. The wind snarled and scratched at my window. It groaned and shrieked. It gurgled and hissed. I hadn’t heard sounds like this since the last time I binged on Guinness and chicken tikka masala. But it wasn’t really the weather that shook me up — it was a footstep outside my apartment, sometime around 4 a.m. Ah yes, Terror No. 1167: a madman breaking in and bludgeoning me to death.

Of course, I’m not the only person who frets about stuff like this. I’m sure there are many who lie awake at night waiting to meet their end at the hands of a brutal sociopath. And yet there can be few who are as accomplished at nocturnal worrying as I am. Awake in bed at night, I don’t just lie there thinking, " I hope someone doesn’t bludgeon me to death. " I develop a plot, outline the main players. I produce and direct a feature-length movie — a terrifying journey into the dark heart of the human psyche — complete with Oscar-worthy performances and gruesome special effects.

Here’s how it goes: there’ll be a guy — Damien — standing over my bed, grinning maniacally. " What do you want? " I’ll whimper. " I have money. " When I get no response, I’ll try pleading — " I love life! " — but Damien feeds on stuff like this. " Ha-ha! " he’ll say, throwing his head back. So I’ll try to fend him off, only to discover that Damien fights dirty, prison-style, a shiv-intensive technique he learned from a guy named Moe, the same guy who gave him a taste for sadistic, forcible sex. Finally, having fulfilled his demonic fantasies, Damien will bludgeon me to death with one of my bookends.

I experience Terror No. 1167 quite often these days. There are a few variations — Damien will bludgeon me with a frying pan, say, or he’ll be joined by Jim-Joe, a buddy from his days in ’Nam — but the outcome is always the same: a fretful, sleepless night followed by a miserable, unproductive day at work. So debilitating have my slasher fantasies become, I now sleep with a butcher knife under my mattress. And every night before I go to bed, I check that the knife’s still there, lest Damien — plot twist! — be hiding in the closet, sharpening the thing on his teeth.

If this were my only waking nightmare, it wouldn’t be so bad. But my fears are legion. I am scared, for instance, of speed. I cannot travel more than 10 feet in a car without envisioning roadside stews of blood and glass. Not long ago I went skiing in Vermont, and as I tottered down the bunny slope, preschoolers and octogenarians overtaking me on all sides, I fell and landed on my head a dozen times, killing myself instantly. I also impaled myself on a tree limb, froze to death in the brush, and plummeted from the ski lift, landing on a tourist from the Baltics — a deadly incident for both of us.

I haven’t always been like this. As a kid, my fears were relatively few: I was scared of Paul Nix, master of the ancient art of the Indian sunburn; I was scared of Coco, my mother’s halitosis-stricken, foul-tempered toy poodle; I was scared of Mrs. Deere, a redwood-legged, violence-prone third-grade teacher; and I was terrified of Angela, an older girl with whom I had fallen in love. But that was about all. It was manageable.

By my teenage years, I was practically fear-free. I hitched rides from shifty-eyed truck drivers, hurtled around on my motorcycle, and ran with soccer hooligans — all without a hint of anxiety. I even learned to relax around Coco, who — by then blind and missing all but three of his teeth — was more horrific than ever. And this carefree attitude stayed with me throughout my adult life. I don’t think it even occurred to me when I was, say, 25, that someone might crawl through my window and use one of my own bookends against me.

No more. Today, I live in the moment of death. I force myself, over and over, to imagine what it must feel like to know: this is it. I eat a nut, I choke; I go out at night, I’m stabbed; a walk in the woods is an invitation to be mauled to death by a bear. And when I actually have to do something genuinely dangerous — like boarding an airplane — I immediately start composing the next day’s headlines: terror in the skies; hundreds killed. Recently, walking through downtown Boston, I found myself scouting out hiding places, should a nuclear bomb go off. There weren’t any.

The odd thing about all this is, I don’t obsess over the things that are truly likely to get me — cancer, embolisms of the heart and brain. And maybe this is the point. Maybe the daily practice of concocting a spectacular death for myself makes every day a kind of bonus. Maybe I improvise these fantastic, bizarre scenarios — fiery explosions, sadistic killers — to distract myself from the real thing. The ordinary and the inevitable.

See, I’ve witnessed the end of the world a million times, but the dark splotch on the x-ray — this I cannot imagine.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com