Bad Dreams

We're supposed to be packing right now to head out of town first thing in the morning, but Adaline is rinning a high fever, so our trip is on hold/possibly cancelled. She started running the fever yesterday afternoon and awoke this morning around 4am with a temp of 104.3. I gave her some Tylenol and stayed up for a while putting cool wet cloths on her forehead, neck, etc. trying to bring the fever down faster, since it was high enough that it was making me a little nervous. After a little while she said she was feeling better and she wasn't burning up so much so I told her I would tuck her back in so she could sleep. To this she replied

"When I close my eyes me see a show (aka TV or movie) and it's scary."

I asked her what her bad dream was about and she said something about Elmo and scary monsters so I tried to help her recreate the dream with a happy twist. And she was back off to dreamland for a few more hours...

Speaking of bad dreams last Saturday night I heard Stewart one night. His closet shares the wall with one side of our room and I awoke to what sounded like someone in the closet moving around the hangers. Then I could see the hall light turn on outside my closed door. So I got up to check on him and he was laying in his bed as if he'd never been up. He'd had a bad dream and didn't want to talk about it nor did he remember being in the closet. I turned off the hall light and turned on a small lamp in his room and he was asleep again in no time.

The next morning I asked about his dream and he still didn't want to talk about it. So I told him that I'd had a bad dream once when I was about his age that was so vivid and scary for me that I've still not forgotten about it. In the dream I was with my little sister, Karen, and we were in some industrial park type complex and it was getting dark. We found a little alley between two buildings with a chain link fence at the end and we curled up to sleep there for the night. When I woke up (in my dream) her arm had fallen through the chain link fence and was being eaten by dogs. I was so terrified that I think I woke up crying and for years I could feel the awful feeling in my stomache that I felt in my dream whenever I recalled it.

Sharing my dream seemed to help Stewart feel better about sharing his and he told us that he had been dreaming about baby tigers in the bushes and they were attacking him and Adaline. He said he had jumped on one and crushed its mouth.

Are you drawing the same conclusion that I did when I heard that? I'm thinking that the noise in the closet may have been my little sleepwalker checking the bushes for tigers...