Clocks and Demonology

Sleep comes when it comes. It doesn't come much at all anymore, due to the confluence of boredom, worry, caffeine, the lack of consequences and cravings for entertainment and intelligence.
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In the past few years my sleeping schedule has become a strange sort of creature. I can subsist on a few hours of sleep per night until I crash at the end of the week. It's not uncommon for me to be awake at 4 a.m., watching Extenze infomercials and reruns of "King of Queens," or trolling the city's neighborhoods by car with a cup of coffee in hand. But I must admit I am always filled with dread, or at least a sense of heightened awareness, during the three o'clock hour.
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A few years ago I made the mistake of seeing "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," an odd film starring Laura Linney that somewhat successfully blends horror with elements of courtroom drama. What I remember most about it is the idea of the "witching hour." Of course we've all heard of this. The witching hour is another name for 3 a.m. and the sixty minutes that follow, named so because it's the supposed inverse of the hour Christ died on the cross, and it's when the demons get to come out and tear things up.
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The film reminded me of a story my sister's friend told me when I was probably no older than six. Every Halloween, she said, Satan comes out to play. Any trick-or-treaters left on the streets past a reasonable hour -- say, 9:00 p.m. -- would be collected by Satan and his minions, never to be heard from again. This story has stuck with me all these years. During college I worked as a solo nighttime janitor for a kitchen facility. It was more than a little unnerving to be swabbing the floors on Halloween night, especially as midnight approached. I ran out of there after I finished my work for the night but fully expected to see Satan waiting for me at my car: arms crossed, cloven hoofs clopping against the asphalt, smoking a cigarette and checking his watch as if to suggest, "Where you been all my life, Billy boy?"
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All the bad things that happened to the title character in "Emily Rose" occurred between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. I'm paranoid to begin with, and despite all the "satan metal" I've been listening to for the last twenty years, I must admit a deep, nagging fear of demons. I believe they are real, and not just in the alcoholism sense. (I also believe in werewolves and "devil deer," if that means anything.) It must be the Catholic upbringing, made worse by my purposeful straying from Christian territory.
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So if I'm already awake at 3 a.m., I flick on an extra light or two, and I always turn the TV to something uplifting ... or at least something not about demonic possession, ritual sacrifice or methods for inviting evil forces into one's place of residence. If I'm asleep and wake up anytime between 3 and 4 in the morning, I do one of two things: Sink deeper beneath the protective veneer of my blanket (because such subterfuge always fools a demon) or curl up a little closer to my trusty dog, Moose. This may sound silly, but I breathe a little easier when 3:59 turns to 4:00.
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Still the notion raises a few questions: Do demons recognize Daylight Saving Time? Are they bound by it? What about time zones? And, of course, what befalls the poor soul whose house sits on the line between the Eastern and Central time zones? Does he have to deal with witching hours, plural? Perhaps, instead of wrestling with such ideas, I should simply take a swig off a bottle of NyQuil and let the mind take a break from itself. But where's the fun in that?