The Dream Is Finished

Two forty in the morning, and the hand on your arm is very small.

You knew before you opened your eyes. You knew from the dip of the mattress and from the breathing, which is too fast and too shallow and has been going on for a while in the doorway before it came any closer.

"It is still in my head."

That is what they say. Not I had a bad dream, which is a sentence for the morning. At two forty they say it is still in my head, because that is the actual problem. The dream stopped. Nobody told the head.

And you, in the dark, are running on nothing. You have a shift in four hours and a lunch to make and a thing at work you have been dreading since Monday, and you have already used up every sentence you have. You have said it was just a dream. You have said it is not real. You have said Mummy is here, Daddy is here, go back to sleep. None of it worked the last time either, and you know it, and you are about to say it again because it is all you have.

Here is the thing nobody tells you.

Do not ask what it was about.

You will want to. It feels like care. It feels like getting to the bottom of it. But a four year old asked to describe a dream at two forty in the morning will go back into it to fetch the details for you, and they will pull it out into the room where you are both standing, and now it is in the room. You have not defused it. You have introduced it. Ask in the morning, over toast, in the daylight, if they still want to tell you. At two forty you do the other thing.

You put the lamp on.

Not the big light. The small one. And then you do something that looks like nothing at all and is actually the whole rescue: you look at the room with them. The curtain. The shelf with the animals on it. The door, which is a door. The chair with yesterday's jumper over the back of it. You are not proving anything and you are not arguing with anybody. You are just showing them the room they are actually in, one ordinary thing at a time, until the room stops being the place the dream happened and goes back to being their room.

And then the sentence. The one they can say back to you.

The one who was awake the whole time

There is something underneath a child's night fear that is not really about the dark, and once you hear it you cannot unhear it.

The fear is not only that something was frightening. The fear is that they were alone in it.

Think about it from inside a small body. You go to sleep in a room with people who love you nearby. Then something happens that you did not choose, that you could not stop, that nobody else saw, and that nobody else can be told about properly because you do not have the words yet. Whatever else it was, it was theirs alone. That is the part that keeps the head running at two forty.

So the answer is not bravery. Please do not make it bravery. Do not tell them there is nothing to be scared of, and do not praise them for not being scared, because now they have a job to do at three in the morning and they are four.

The answer is company. And the whole weight of this is that the company was already there.

And you are not being asked to talk your child out of a feeling. Psalm 121:3 says He will not let your foot slip and the one who guards you does not slumber, and the Spirit is the one who was in that room while everybody else in the house was unconscious.

He will not let your foot slip. The one who guards you does not slumber. Look, the one who guards Israel does not slumber and does not sleep.Psalm 121, verses 3 and 4

Read who is doing what in that sentence. Not the child. Not you. The guard.

And you were never the one on watch. Scripture puts the guarding on Him and never on a parent who is also asleep at two in the morning, and the Spirit is the one who held that room while you were no use to anybody.

And read the strange detail, the one that reads almost like a boast: He does not slumber and He does not sleep. Twice. As if the Holy Spirit knew that this exact line would be needed by exactly this family at exactly this hour, and made sure it could not be misheard.

Everybody in that house was asleep. Every single person your child loves was unconscious and no use to anybody, including you, and there is no shame in that at all, because you are a human being and human beings sleep. But the room was not unattended. Not for one minute of it. Scripture says so plainly and the Spirit is the one who was doing the attending. While the dream was happening, God was awake in that room, and He was not watching from a distance and He was not going to fetch someone. He was the one keeping watch, which is what He has been doing over that bed every night since the day you brought them home.

That is the true thing your child needs at two forty. Not the dream was not real, which they will not believe, because it was extremely real to feel. The true thing is: it is finished, and you were never in it by yourself.

And you are handing over a fact, not a hope. His word says the one who guards you does not slumber, and the Spirit is the one who makes a fact land on a small person at two forty in the morning.