"A Very Bad Dream"

Amanda sometimes has dreams which she finds to be rather upsetting. However, hearing her description of them is really quite entertaining. As she relates her dreams to me, I often find myself having one of those "even though it requires the use of every muscle, I am suppressing my laughter for now, but the minute I get a chance, I'm going to walk up to my room, close the door, and laugh out loud until I'm done" moments. Everyone who has ever been a parent of a young child knows exactly the kind of moment I’m talking about.

One of my favorite dreams is the one in which Amanda's Granddad (actually her great-granddad) “turned into a fish”, chased Amanda down, and gobbled her up. Apparently the whole thing was realistic enough that it was scary to her, but to me, Amanda’s report of a kind old man morphing into a crazy child-eating fish was just odd enough to be funny … Of course, I wasn’t the one that got eaten … I may have reacted differently if I had been the victim in such an awful scene.

In a more recent dream, our family was canoeing and Amanda fell into the water. As she reported the dream to us, she angrily pointed out that neither of her parents bothered to get her out of the water, and because we had not properly outfitted her with a “boat-coat” she “went to the bottom”. I can see how a dream like that would be upsetting to a child, but it was hard not to laugh at how frustrated she was with our parental negligence. What were we thinking? Who takes their family on a canoeing trip with no “boat-coats”?

Needless to say, in our house we often have discussions about dreams.

Recently, Lily has added "dreams" to her list of things that she is truly concerned about. I use quotation marks on “dreams” because Lily has no idea what a dream really is. As best as we can tell, Lily has determined in her mind that anything that causes her to be upset (for any reason and at any time during the day or night) is a “dream.” And for some weird reason, she has identified a very small freckle on her left shin as the source of all “dreams”. When she wakes up in the night, fights with her sister over lunch, gets hurt, or becomes upset for any reason at all, she pulls up her pant leg, points to her freckle, and through sobs utters the words, “I have a very bad dream.”

It’s sad for a minute, and I do my best to console her, but then I go right up to my room, close the door, and laugh until I’m done ... again. Good times!