by Maria Tussing

Created on: May 26, 2008   Last Updated: June 17, 2008

The nightmare lingered through the day. At 4:30 this morning I got up, got a drink of water and stood in my daughter's doorway. The nightmares had started when Elisa started sleeping through the night. I didn't think I'd miss the thudding of footie-pajamaed feet at three a.m., but I'll take the endless stroking of the sleepy fingers on the inside of my arm over the far-reaching tentacles of the nightmares. The few minutes of nighttime waking begun by the barely-audible, "Nee you, Mama," suddenly seemed more valuable than the uninterrupted sleep filled with darkness.

I resisted the urge to smooth Elisa's hair, knowing she was a hair-trigger sleeper. It always worried me that Ethan could, and did, sleep through anything. He never stirred the night the smoke detectors malfunctioned, clogged with dust and damp. We can roll him over to search for the various puppies and baby foals, the "snuggles" that will require a midnight search-and-rescue mission if they go astray in the sheets in the night. His eyes never flutter.
But if we put a light sheet over Elisa, she'll kick it off as soon as it touches her calves. She might not wake, but she's aware.
I'm curious about the nature of nightmares. I wonder if I have bad dreams I can't remember, or if all the traumatic stuff forces its way through my subconscious, poking at my brain until it can't stand to be silent anymore and wakes up.
There are dreams I can remember, but don't want to put into words. When I was pregnant I was always dreaming about the men in my past. Some I had dated, some only kissed, some hid from after school. But they marched through my dreams, like an all-male homecoming parade, leaving me wondering, "What if" I hadn't gotten pregnant, hadn't taken the internship, hadn't gone to college where it was cheapest, hadn't sent the e-mail. But at 5:30 when my husband walks in, the dreams are sent back to the darkness, and "what if" is shelved until my next dreamy night.
But the real nightmares won't be shut in the closet. My nightmares are never filled with imaginary things. Never floating away from the spaceshuttle, my tether sliced by a vengeful fellow-astronaut. Nothing lurks under the bed.
I can remember two dreams from her childhood, one where my father had been arrested for something I'd done. That one happened one night just before Easter. It wasn't a stretch to see the transference. The other was of a mountain lion crouched on the kitchen counter, fangs bared at Spice, our arthritic blue heeler. That

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