So with Steve's trip have come the return of the nightmares. I anticipated this, and on the first night that he was gone and Johnny began to have trouble sleeping, I took down the dreamcatcher from above my bed and brought it into his room. It was bought on the Cherokee reservation during a trip we took to North Carolina. I hung it on a hook on the wall (I didn't have string to hang it from the ceiling) and explained that it was supposed to catch any bad dreams that he might have.
Mr. Literal didn't buy it. He told me that it couldn't work because it didn't sit sideways like a "closed basketball hoop" to catch them if he threw the bad dreams up to it, and it wasn't sticky to catch them if he threw them at it while it was sideways. Dreamcatcher = fail.
I grasped around inside my sleep-deprived brain at 3am to come up with an alternative solution. A dream BOX! Ah-hah! Okay, so we were going to make a dream box, where he could put his bad dreams when he had them, and then they could stay in there and become good dreams.
-- He needed a fail-safe option. In case it didn't work.
Okay, well if some of them (or all) didn't become good dreams, we could flush the remaining bad dreams down the toilet.
In the morning.
Don't EVER forget to add in clauses with Johnny, or else you'll be doing things at 4am right after he has the bad dream and says the box "didn't work". I think the flush-them-down-the-toilet thing is reminiscent of was to get rid of dead fish, but nevertheless...
In all of this, it is important to keep in mind two things:
1. Dreams in their non-embodied state look very much like blown kisses and can be handled as such. You can throw them and catch them, lock them away in boxes or dump them in toilets.
2. However literal and rational one may be about how to handle said dreams, they are still invisible and, let's face it, imaginary once in a state outside of the sleeping mind. So... at least he's creative when it comes to his literal handling of imaginary (yet real?) things!
Mr. Literal didn't buy it. He told me that it couldn't work because it didn't sit sideways like a "closed basketball hoop" to catch them if he threw the bad dreams up to it, and it wasn't sticky to catch them if he threw them at it while it was sideways. Dreamcatcher = fail.
I grasped around inside my sleep-deprived brain at 3am to come up with an alternative solution. A dream BOX! Ah-hah! Okay, so we were going to make a dream box, where he could put his bad dreams when he had them, and then they could stay in there and become good dreams.
-- He needed a fail-safe option. In case it didn't work.
Okay, well if some of them (or all) didn't become good dreams, we could flush the remaining bad dreams down the toilet.
In the morning.
Don't EVER forget to add in clauses with Johnny, or else you'll be doing things at 4am right after he has the bad dream and says the box "didn't work". I think the flush-them-down-the-toilet thing is reminiscent of was to get rid of dead fish, but nevertheless...
In all of this, it is important to keep in mind two things:
1. Dreams in their non-embodied state look very much like blown kisses and can be handled as such. You can throw them and catch them, lock them away in boxes or dump them in toilets.
2. However literal and rational one may be about how to handle said dreams, they are still invisible and, let's face it, imaginary once in a state outside of the sleeping mind. So... at least he's creative when it comes to his literal handling of imaginary (yet real?) things!
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