That Feeling Is Not About Them

At ten to three in the morning she was standing in her father's doorway, not crying, which was somehow worse.

He got up. He did the things. Water, the landing light, back to her own bed, blanket straightened. And when he asked her, in the useless way everybody asks it, what happened, she said four words and then closed her mouth for the rest of the night.

"You were in it."

He did not ask her anything else, which turned out to be the wisest thing he did all week, though at the time it only felt like not knowing what to say.

The trouble started the next morning. She would not go upstairs while he was up there. She stood in the kitchen doorway watching him make the coffee with a look he had never had aimed at him before, and at the door she held on to his sleeve for a beat too long, and by the evening she had worked out how to be in whichever room he was not in.

Nothing had happened. He knew that. She knew that too, in the part of a six year old that knows things. But the feeling had come out of the dream with her, and it had nowhere to go, so it had gone and sat on him.

That is what nobody tells you about a bad dream in a small house. The dream ends. The feeling does not, and a feeling has to attach to something, and a child will attach it to whoever was in the picture.

By the second night he was sitting on the edge of her bed with all his good sentences gone. He knew better than to talk her through it again. He knew asking her to describe it would only draw it out where they could both see it, and he had no intention of doing that to her at half past seven at night.

That is the room this is written for. Not a lesson about dreams. One ordinary bedroom, one small person carrying a feeling that got stuck to the wrong person, and a parent who has run out.

There is something true about that room, and it is worth having ready before the light goes off.

The dream is finished, and the room is the real one

Two things are true at once here, and children can only hold one of them at a time.

The first is that it was real to feel. Not real in the room, not real now, but the fright a body makes at two in the morning is a genuine event that genuinely happened inside a small chest. Telling a child it was only a dream is true and it lands like a dismissal, because they are not confused about the facts. They are stuck with the leftovers.

The second is that the leftovers are looking for somewhere to live. Give them nowhere and they take the nearest person.

And you are not the only one who was in that room with them. Psalm 3:5 says a person lies down and sleeps and wakes up again because the Lord is the one keeping them, and it was the Holy Spirit doing that keeping the whole time it was happening.

I lay down and I slept, and I woke up again, because the Lord is the one keeping me.Psalm 3:5

The whole time it was happening. That is the load bearing part, and it is worth saying slowly, because what a child actually fears about a dream is not the pictures. It is that they were in there on their own.

You have permission to leave the whole thing undescribed. Scripture puts the comfort in who was present rather than in what occurred, and the Holy Spirit settles a small chest without one single detail being handed over.

So do not go looking for it. Do not ask what was in it, do not fill in the gaps, and do not repeat back the bit they told you. Naming it draws it, and at that hour a drawn thing stays in the room long after the talking stops.

The feeling is not a message about them

Now the part this whole message exists for.

A dream is not information. It is not a warning, it is not a sign, and it is not a report on the person who turned up in it. Your child does not know that yet, and it would be a hard thing to explain at bedtime, so the message does not explain it. The message simply moves the feeling off the person and puts something true in its place.

You were given a true thing to say about the one who was in that dream, and it is not a forecast. His word says God is with them, and the Holy Spirit is as present in their room tonight as He is in this one.

Notice what that sentence does not do. It does not promise nothing bad ever happens to anybody. A child remembers a promise like that, and a promise a night cannot keep is worse than no sentence at all. What it says is where God is, which is the one thing that stays true whatever the week turns out to hold.

You are holding a difference your child cannot hold yet. Scripture calls Him the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the Holy Spirit keeps that watch over the person in the dream and the person in the bed at the very same time.