A Family of Dreamers

by Beverly Tjerngren

My son, who is four, has recently started to be aware of his dreams. His dreams are mostly nightmares, it seems, with monsters featuring heavily. He dreams that he is a monster, or that his sisters are, or that his father and I are. He dreams that all of us are gone and he can't find us and monsters are chasing him. He dreams that all of us, together, are fighting wars against monsters. The themes change slightly, but always there are monsters.

Sometimes at night I hear him shout out, either, "No, no, no!" or "Mama!" or a stream of gibberish. Most often he doesn't wake up and, after a minute or two, I roll over and go back to sleep. Other times he comes into my room and stands quietly at the side of the bed, waiting for me to pat the space beside me in invitation before crawling in next to me. He talks about the monster dreams, sometimes, but he doesn't seem upset by them. The scariness doesn't linger.

My older daughter, age ten, talks about her dreams, too. She also has nightmares, but decided long ago that, as she says, "bad dreams are good and good dreams are bad." What she means is that she would rather have nightmares because when she wakes up she has the relief of knowing that they're not real. Good dreams, on the other hand, are disappointing because she has to wake up to the realization that I haven't actually bought her her must-have item of the week. This is a feeling I remember all too well from my years of dreaming nightly that I had finally, finally gotten a horse. How I hated waking from those dreams.

My baby daughter is a dreamer as well, though she doesn't know it yet--or can't articulate it, at any rate. She laughs in her sleep, chuckles deep from her belly and delighted little giggles that make me yearn to know what dreams her mind has conjured.

My husband says that he rarely remembers his dreams. That doesn't surprise me, but I'd expand the list of things he doesn't remember to include nearly everything that doesn't relate to computers or Star Trek. He does talk in his sleep now and then, so it's clear that he does dream, but he mostly mumbles, so I can't get any idea of what he dreams about. Most often when I hear him sleep-talking, he's speaking English instead of his native Swedish, but when I ask him about it he doesn't remember any details, not even language.

I dream, too, of course, but my dreams are of no particular interest to me. Mostly they're annoying, either making my sleep restless and uneasy or lulling me so deeply into cozy dreamland that I struggle to wake, even when my alarm is blaring next to my head. Perhaps I would find I missed dreaming, if I were able to stop, but I doubt it. I think I'd rather have the uninterrupted sleep.