Reminds me of this piece by Charlie Brooker that always stuck with me:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/may/12/comment.charliebrooker

"It's late at night, pitch black outside, and you're in the house alone. You switch off the television. All is quiet. It's bedtime. You walk to the window to draw the curtains. And there it is! Face at the window! Aaaaarrgh! A scraggy-haired lunatic with googly eyes! Maybe he's glaring, maybe he's grinning - whatever he's doing, this isn't good news. Because he's either actually there, in which case he's about to burst in, hack your face off and use it as a hanky, or you're hallucinating, in which case you've lost your mind, and you'll have to spend the rest of your life wandering shirtless into traffic, screaming about MI5 and geese and phantoms.

It's childish I know, but the terror of the face at the window plays on my mind whenever I draw the curtains at night. I even worry I've somehow jinxed myself by simply thinking about it in the first place: that since I've got the thought lodged in my head now, I might go crazy and imagine he's there.

How long does it take to go crazy anyway? Do you need a bit of a run-up, or is it possible to snap your mind in a nanosecond? And surely, once you've seen the face at the window, there's no going back. You don't just rub your eyes and forget about it.

And then I think: hang on, the fact that you're even having this debate in your head proves you've gone mad already. Seeing the face is simply the next logical phase. You'll DEFINITELY see it now! Argh!

So to safeguard myself, I end up drawing the curtains with my eyes shut. Which is the sort of thing a crazy person might do. I can't win - the face wins, whether it's there or not."