Nightmares

We've had a little visitor in the middle of the night quite a bit of late. It seems that Gillian is drumming up some doozies and even with the hall light and a nightlight she gets a little freaked out when she wakes up in a quiet, sleepy house. I guess I started to notice this trend a couple of months ago when she called me into her room and asked about "that black thing on the side of the window". I pulled up the shade and showed her that it was the window frame.

Our fat, lazy, roly poly cat induces near hysteria if she has the audacity to jump on the bed (or even walk by Gillian's bedroom door) at night, imagined to be some terrible monster of mythical proportions. I spent 15 minutes explaining that Booger is many things, but Lazy is the #1 thing, and that in itself would preclude her from doing such ambitious things as biting a little girl's face off, for example. I started thinking, as I was demonstrating on Gillian's hand how hard Booger bites when you give her those spankings she likes, that maybe I shouldn't be doing that. But, it ended all the paranoid talk with laughter, which is probably as good as it is going to get (I later showed her physically this phenomenon-Booger, in her usual fashion, enjoyed her light spanking and then bit me with little love bites, then licked my hand).

Then there was the "bad dream" about the alligator that started the alligator fear phase. And there was the snake who came in the house and he made us start a fire and then he ate it and it made his tummy hurt and so he went away (to which I replied, "isn't that a GOOD dream? We made his fire so spicy it made him go away with a tummy ache?!!)... I think most of these are kind of cute, but the second one on this video clip is just not cute or funny at all. Because God knows it probably happens to someone in this world every day.



So, the rule is that Gillian can always come to us at night when she's scared as long as she doesn't startle us out of REM sleep with a dramatic tantrum. She has been pretty fantastic about just climbing into our bed or whispering to one if us that she's scared and asking one of us to go sleep in her room. The dreams she describes are perfectly weird enough to be dreams and not an excuse to come sleep with us ("I dreamed this bad cat was really a dog who could change into a cat or a dog whenever he wanted").

As an aside: ever since we decided to tow the hard line with night waking with Addie, she has happily slept through the night. Silly us for not doing it much sooner.