The Part Where You Close Your Eyes

She is seven, and she is lying perfectly flat with both hands on top of the duvet and her eyes wide open at the ceiling.

Not crying. That finished a while ago. She is holding her eyes open deliberately, the way you hold a door.

Her dad has been sitting on the floor beside the bed long enough that his back has started to complain about it. He has done all the sensible things and none of them have helped. He turned the big light on. He said it was not real. He said it was over. He said she was safe, twice, in the voice that usually settles her.

And then she said the thing that took the ground out from under him, in about eleven words.

"I do not want to close them. That is where it starts."

He had been answering the wrong question all evening. He had been talking about the dark and the room and the shapes of things, and she had not been frightened of any of those. She was frightened of the closing. Of the small ordinary movement she makes a thousand times a day. Every time her eyelids get heavy she yanks them back open, and she has been doing it for forty minutes, and she is exhausted, and she is losing.

He says nothing for a bit. He rests his hand on the mattress and looks at the glow stars they put up crookedly two summers ago.

That floor is what this is written for. Not a lesson about being brave. A parent on a carpet at ten past nine, out of sensible things, beside a small person who has decided that sleep is the doorway and is standing in front of it with both arms out.

There is something true here, and it goes in a different place than a parent expects. Not into the dream. Into the room.

The dream and the room are two different places

Start here, because everything depends on it: the dream and the bedroom are not the same place, and a small person has not sorted them into two yet.

To a seven year old, the dream happened. It did not happen the way toast happens, but it happened somewhere, and the somewhere feels like it was in here, because in here is where she was lying when it did. So the bed becomes the place it came from, and the eyelids become the door it came through, and now the door has to be held shut all night by a child who weighs three stone.

That is why saying it was not real does not land. She knows it was not real. Real was never the argument. Where it is now, that is the argument.

You are not being asked to argue with a dream tonight. Psalm 3:5 says I lie down and sleep and I wake again, because the Lord keeps me, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary sentence like that hold in a room at ten past nine.

So do not go back in. Do not ask what it was about, and do not have her walk you through it while the lamp is off, because telling it at night is living in it twice. If she wants to tell you, morning is a good time and daylight does half the work for free. Tonight, the dream is not the subject. The room is the subject.

You have permission to leave the whole thing unexamined until breakfast. Scripture never once asks a tired person to explain themselves before they are held, and the Spirit is entirely able to settle a child who has not said a word about what happened.

Here is the piece of information that does the work. That dream stopped. And it did not come out into this room, because it was never a thing in this room.

The whole time it was happening

Now the second half, and it answers something a child has usually not said out loud.

Underneath the fear of closing is a quieter fear, and it is this: that when it was happening, she was on her own in it. That the dream was a place nobody else could reach, and she went there by herself, and tonight she has to go back alone. That is a lonely thought for a person of seven to carry at bedtime, and most of them have no words to hand it over.

So hand them the answer without making them ask the question.

I lie down and sleep, and I wake again, because the Lord keeps me.Psalm 3:5

The keeping is not something that starts when the eyes open. It runs straight through. Through the falling asleep, through the sleeping, through whatever the sleeping contained, through the waking up. There is no gap in it, and no moment of the night God missed because the child could not see Him.

You were never handed a night with a hole in it. His word says the Lord is the one who keeps, and He does not slumber, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a fact in a bedroom rather than a nice idea in a book.

That is why the phrase to say is the whole time it was happening. Not afterwards. Not now that it is over. The whole time.

You have nothing left to explain, and none of this ever depended on your explaining. Scripture says He promised never to leave, and the Spirit carries a flat, tired sentence into a small person better than a good one delivered well.

Nobody is asking her to be brave about closing her eyes. Bravery would make the night her job, and it is not her job. A child praised for coping learns that coping is the price of being loved. What is on offer is not courage. It is company, in the one part of the night she thought she went alone.