Tag Archives: dreams

A 3-year-old’s bad dreams are built at the aquarium

'Garden Eel' by William Warby. I can see where these fellas might cause a boy to have a bad dream.
The rather unsettling 'Garden Eel,' as photographed by William Warby.
Pete usually gets up right about 7:30 in the morning, but he slept in this morning. That isn’t entirely unheard of, especially on rainy, overcast mornings such as we’re having today. Even then, though, he rarely sleeps past 8am. So when 8:30 rolled around and I still hadn’t heard from him, I decided to go wake him up.

(His sister is a Champion Sleeper-Inner. She gets that from me. She slept until 9:30 on this especially dark and restful morning. She usually gets up at 8:30. When I wake her up.)

Petey was curled up on his bed, his thumb in his mouth and his blankey firmly clutched in his little fist. His eyes opened as soon as I walked into his room.

“Hey buddy,” I said. “You sure have slept a long time this morning.”

“Well,” he said, “there was a snake on my bed. It popped up.”

Mentioning snakes and beds in the same breath is not the way to put me in my most rational mind, so I had about half a second of panic before I realized that it was much more likely that he’d been dreaming than that we’d been invaded by pop-up snakes. I pulled him into my lap and assured him that it had been a dream, and we cuddled there in the floor for a few minutes before heading off for to brush his teeth.

Later, he told me more about the dream.

The snake sneaked up on me three times, and then he sneaked up on me no more. And then a shark came, and then I didn’t stomp on the snake. And then nothing happened. I just shooted the shark with my eyes. I closed my eyes, and I shooted him when I closed my eyes. And then he wasn’t caming back, and the snake wasn’t.

That sounds like a really horrible dream for a 3-year-old. Or for a 32-year-old, for that matter. I’m not sure where Pete’s fear of snakes came from — unless it’s genetic — but I’m relatively certain the garden eels we saw at the aquarium didn’t help matters. They freaked him out, and he’s asked several times since why “those snakes popped up.”

Baby had a bad, bad dream

Poppy’s been doing much better with the staying-in-bed thing. We made a chart with 10 spaces for stickers on it, and she gets a sticker every morning that she wakes up in her own bed. Once she gets 10 stickers, she’s going to get a trip to Build-a-Bear. And, of course, a bear. She has four stickers so far, but she landed in our bed again this morning at about 5:30. She was shaken, and she told me she had “the bad dream about the popping-out eyes.” That does indeed sound like a bad dream. Once we were up and around this morning, she told me the whole nightmare:

There’s a baby bunny, and it wants to see the whale. It wants to see the whale up close and down deep. The baby bunny’s mommy says, “No! You must not go down deep.” But it goes to see the whale up close, and the baby bunny’s eyes pop out and he falls over.

Yikes. I can’t imagine where she would’ve seen or read anything about the dangers of deep-sea diving, but where else could she have gotten such an idea?