Dreaming...On Such a Winter's Day

When the boys were babies and they'd mumble in their sleep, or wake up in terror after a nightmare, I'd wonder what they could possibly be dreaming about.  With such a small, insular world, what were their dreams made of?  As they got older and could increasingly verbalize the content of their nightmares, I began to understand their fears and what drove those middle of the night wake-ups.  Ethan's triggers are so obvious, and tend to be of the standard monster/bad guy/imagination run wild/eyes playing tricks on me variety.  We watched Happy Feet on Friday during the blizzard and I just knew that seal with the big scary yellow teeth would be a problem.  Sure enough, he awoke terrified in the middle of the night, convinced that the seal was climbing the ladder to his bunk.  Adam's nightmares tend to be closer to reality and are often conflict-oriented.  He wakes yelling "No, Ethan!" or "No, Mommy!" or "No (fill in the blank friend from school)!", and when I ask him about what was happening in his dream, it usually involves someone chasing or hurting or bothering him.  It's so interesting how our psyche processes our world while we sleep, and how different the "enemy" is for each of our boys.

I hate when my kids have nightmares, but I love how easily they can be soothed back to sleep with a mom or dad's touch and some reassuring words.  When the boys were really little, I made up (or perhaps heard somewhere and stole), this ritual that chases even the scariest nightmares away.  I rub their foreheads lightly and whisper, "Bad dreams, bad dreams, go away.  Good dreams, good dreams, here to stay."  And that's it.  That's enough to take away all the badness in these boys' worlds, and I watch their small bodies soften and their eyes droop and they're back in happy dreamland.  If it could only stay that easy forever.

So while I generally know what's going on in their nightmares, I still don't know much about these boys' dreams.  Nightmares are rare - what makes up the rest of their sleepy nights?  Both Ethan and Adam are active sleepers - they toss and turn and shift and talk and sometimes even get out of bed and wander off.  Dreams have come up in conversation recently, and we've gotten a bit of a window into what goes on in those little imaginations while they snooze.  Ethan started telling us a story about his friend Dylan Fox, and how steam was coming out of his ears, and isn't that cool, and wait....maybe that was a dream?  We all had a good laugh, and he loved hearing that even Mommy and Daddy have trouble distinguishing a dream from reality sometimes.  Adam, apparently, dreams of chocolate chips, which is particularly puzzling considering that the kid claims he doesn't like chocolate.  Maybe his psyche is trying to sort that craziness out?  After all, who doesn't like chocolate?!  Anyway, he came downstairs one morning last week saying, "Mommy, I had the BEST dream.  I was walking outside in our yard, and it was sunny, and there were chocolate chips...EVERYWHERE!".  Like a lot of us New Englanders at this time of year, he's also dreaming of sunnier days.  He had a dream just the other night that he was on T'Kozy beach, "diggin'".  Right there with you, little man - I'm dreamin' of diggin' on the beach too, with some chocolate chips to boot.  And hey, if Dylan Fox walks on by with some steam coming out of his ears, well that's just icing on the cake.

What my dreams are made of