Just before dawn, my eight year old called to me in my dream. I awoke and checked on her, in case it was a psychic distress call (for which I have precedent). A dead kitten once mewed for me to come find his broken body in the road, the half-brick that was used to crush his brittle skull discarded in haste a short distance away. Cats will break your heart like that. Although the logic of replacing them with children may not be entirely sound.
The child lies breathing, open-mouthed under a mound of blankets. She seems peaceful and undistressed, although it's hard to tell what goes on in the dreams of a little girl when the passions of her days become one with her nights and grow large and errant.
Once, when she was very small, Elmo visited her toddler dreaming and though she had nothing but pure baby love for him and his special needs vocab, he attacked her and diminished her a little with every murderous touch of his rudimentary, fluff-addled hand. In disturbed wakefulness, she chose not to bear a grudge, but that dark nightmare haunted her childhood for some time yet.
Last she told me, it was the 'Empty Child' of Doctor Who ("Are you my mummy?") fulfilling the role of monster in her nightmares. And why else would we offer them Doctor Who and Coraline and Harry Potter, but to furnish their inevitable childhood nightmares with monsters more simply wicked, evil or just disturbing, in order to spare them the real horror that is betrayal at the hands of a beloved furry (or non-furry) friend?
I tell her the 'Empty Child' gave me chills when I first saw it, but it also made a devoted fan girl of me; a wide-eyed watcher of DVDs. We like to be scared. Just a little; when we think we're safe and in control. That's why real nursery rhymes and fairy tales are so macabre.
My second, unborn daughter seems to sleep within; perhaps dreaming sodden dreams of light and dark and muffled voices. What form do her dreamtime monsters take? Does she have nightmares of finding herself suddenly alone, unembraced; or do hers overlap with my daytime fears in bright red splotches and darker clots of blood that shouldn't be. Blood that leaves me exasperated, because for fuck's sake, surely I've shed enough now? Surely my dues are well and truly paid? Blood that, at first, sent me scampering, helpless and alarmed to the emergency room for checks and monitors. And that subsequently, less severe, just leaves me feeling sick and cold and that I mention to the midwife, so she can type a note in a little field on her computer. The blood that keeps me quiet and humble.
Perhaps it was the littlest of my little girls who called to me as I dreamed prosaic adult dreams of being uncomfortably and inconveniently kind to old people. Perhaps she woke me to ask, "Are you there?"; "Can you protect me from the monsters?"
"No, I cannot, precious beloved girl, but I will try with all I have until I am dead. And I promise I will lie to you and tell you that I can, until one day you learn the truth - a process that may begin with an unexpected attack amidst flashes of fur all too familiar in shiny red."
