So Mike and I were woken up by Ava this morning around 4 am. She was crying and I climbed out of bed and walked to her room. She told me she had a very bad dream and she didn’t want to tell me what happened. I said, “Honey, just tell me…it’s only a dream.” That was my first mistake. She tells me, “I had a dream someone sliced you up and cooked you.” What. the. ______?
I can only think of two explanations for this. 1) She’s been secretly watching episodes of Dexter, or 2) I tease her occasionally about her behind being a rump roast and joke that we’re going to have a rump roast for dinner. Either way…it kind of freaked me out.
So I explain that it was just a bad dream but she’s still really upset so I bring her back to our room. She’s trying to fall asleep but keeps crying because she says she can’t stop thinking about the dream. She asks me if she can go to work with me today because she’s worried something bad will happen to me. So of course my anxiety kicks in because, you know, if she had a dream about it then something must be about to happen to me.
Then she says she wishes I was her teacher so she never had to leave me. I ask her if she likes her teacher because, as a parent, my little red flag goes up. She says she loves her teacher but that she just misses me and daddy sometimes. So I said, “Why don’t we plan a tradition for two days out of the week so you’ll have something to look forward to when you’re at school.” She says okay.
My brain is not fully functioning because, hello, it’s 4am. So I suggest Taco Tuesdays and Pizza Fridays. This turns into a whole conversation about how she doesn’t like tacos but we could do burritos on Tuesdays. Then she starts asking if we can do homemade pizzas on Fridays. I swear this kid’s brain is in overdrive sometimes.
Mike asks me this morning, “Why did you say we could do Taco Tuesdays?” I don’t know…I couldn’t think of anything else to take her mind off of the fact that she just dreamed someone sliced me up and cooked me. I figured we should probably cook up something else besides me for dinner. As a parent you’ll promise just about anything at 4am if it means going back to sleep, right?
Lights. Camera. Life. 
Oh, I’ll ‘see’ your Taco Tuesdays and Pizza Fridays, and ‘raise’ you a motorcycle, promised to a sick 7 year old!!
#YeahThat
Hahahaha…that’s a pretty amazing promise!
i would often have bad dreams about my mom, including one that, to this day, i still vividly remember where her coffin was carried on a train through the backwoods. i did a little research on dreams years ago and discovered that these kinds of dreams about our parents are actually very healthy. it’s a way for the subconscious to express a separation, emotional and physical, from our parents on the way to finding our own voice, our own independence. while the images our mind conjures up can be hella frightening, especially to a child, it’s a healthy part of development. (if the dream explanations are to be believed.)
That’s interesting Vej! That makes me feel better!