Death-defying Dreams

The other night, I woke from a nightmare. It was so vivid, so real, I had to write it down to purge myself of it so that I could return to sleep:

I was doing therapy in an old, sprawling, Victorian house with a woman going through a divorce. Initially, she was there to share some concerns about her child, but she wound up talking about herself. I had the sense that walking would put her at ease, so we wandering from room to room, still talking.

In the kitchen we encountered her ex-husband. After a brief exchange, he left. The woman and I stayed and talked a bit, until I noticed her ex-husband’s outline through a frosted glass door and realized he was eavesdropping. I was reluctant to leave the space, thinking to myself, "there's something so intimate about kitchens.” But, I wanted to protect her confidentiality, so we walked on. Suddenly, Sophie was in my arms in that inexplicable dream-like way. I carried her as we walked through an area that had a high, slanted, leaded glass ceiling. Golden, fiery balls were falling from the sky, crashing through the roof, shattering the glass all around us, setting the ground aflame. "Oh." I thought, "it's the golden balls of hail," as if recalling a weather report or a prophecy I had previously heard. I shielded Sophie with my body, as I tried to find my way out of the room. Sophie was fascinated by the balls, staring up at them, pointing to one that was aglow with several different colors. I, on the other hand, was terrified. Everywhere there was splintering glass. I had to run, holding Sophie while looking up to avoid being hit. One golden ball of hail grazed her back. I panicked. We, Sophie, my client, and I, headed outside, quickly determining it was safer than being in the glass-ceiling room. Seeking shelter, we headed back towards the front door of the building, dodging the hail as we went. We could hear the screams of other people in the street, wounded, dying. Just as we finally reached the front door, the hail let up. We had made it through. A woman lay on the steps, moaning. There were bits of blood and what looked like brains on the ground. "What happened?" I cried stupidly, alarmed. "She's been hit." said my client, trying to comfort the woman in her last moments. I couldn't shield Sophie from this awful sight. And then, I woke up.

Since the recent earthquake and floods, my dreams have been morbid. Full of death and destruction. Apocalyptic. Now, more than ever, I am acutely aware that my time on this Earth is limited.

Just days later, three-year-old Sophia shared this dream with me:

“I was in grandma’s kitchen, saving a piece of my pizza crust. I leaned back in my chair and fell down. It made a big hole in the floor. Blood came out of my head. It felt like it had wood chunks inside. Grandma put me in bed in my room. Blood came out on the pillow. I sat up. And grandma put a Band-Aid on it. I felt better.” Which is, presumably, when I walked into the room and found her sitting up in bed, bewildered, but calm.

As she recounted the events of her dream, what I found most remarkable about it was how completely unperturbed she was. I listened, hoping my face didn’t betray my shock that this was the stuff of her dreams—violent and sanguinary as my own.

Sophie talks a lot about death, now. Just today, we were looking at a photograph of her classmates from her first year in nursery school. “They’re not dead,” she remarked. “I just don’t see them any more.” Again, I tried not to miss a beat. “That’s right,” I said, “they’re not dead. They’re in kindergarten.”

She’s working on the concept. Trying to make sense of what becomes of the dead. Her first encounter with death occurred a year ago. It was in a field, while we were picking raspberries. A rat lay lifeless on the ground. She stood over it, wondering at his still form. “It’s not alive anymore,” I told her, avoiding the word dead. My explanation seemed to satisfy her. She enjoyed recalling the story, of finding the rat that was no longer alive.

About a month ago, the grandfather of one of her friends died. She caught me off guard with the inevitable question, “What does it mean to be dead?”

“Well,” I replied slowly, “it’s like the rat. His body is no longer alive. He’s not with us anymore. His body stopped working. But even after a person is dead you can keep him alive in your mind, by thinking about him.”

Again, she seemed satisfied. I followed the psychological guideline of discussing difficult subjects…sex…divorce…death…with young ones: when they stop asking, stop offering.

Still, she continues to grapple with the concept of mortality. In Beauty and the Beast, Gaston gives the war whoop, “Kill the beast!” And later, the beast lies dying in Belle’s arms, only to be resurrected by her love. Sophia recycles this storyline over and over again in her play. As if through the enactment, she will gain some mastery over it. “Daddy, you be the beast,” she instructs. “But be a nice beast.” When Kevin treads on delicate ground, baring his teeth and growling at her, she squeals, half fearful/half delighted, “No! Don’t kill me! Be a nice beast!”

Sophie, with her egocentric orientation to the world, is the boss of death.

For me, the impetus to reflect on my mortality (outside of all of the natural disasters of late), is this no-mans-land of middle age. The recognition that my life may, in fact, be half over. Time is now measured in what I have left, not what I have ahead of me. Suddenly it feels short, time borrowed. I am at death’s mercy:

Death is the boss of me.

Last night, I was having dinner with my family at a soda shop that caters to kids. I took a bite of my salad, swallowed, and felt something hard lodge in my chest. I suddenly lost the ability to breathe. Panicked and choking, I stood. A cranberry shot out of me, from somewhere deep within my trachea. I felt it scratch the raw interior of my airway as a cough propelled it out of my body. As I sat back down all I could think was: what if that had been it? In front of my daughter. My husband. And my mother, who had joined us for dinner.

Life is that tenuous. Or at least it seems so to me. My existence is not special. I have an exaggerated sense of self-importance, but I could be taken down by a cranberry. In a soda shop. In front of my kid.

Our dreams can offer us the illusion of control. In my case, not only can I dodge death, but I can shield my daughter from it. In Sophie’s case, she can confront it and emerge the victor. Graceful, but futile attempts at either end of the spectrum to extend our limited time together.

If You're Scared of a Cow

Over a bowl of oatmeal one morning, Sophia composed a song (sung to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down):

Daddy will pick you up
Pick you up
Pick you up
Pick you up
Daddy will pick you up
If you’re scared of a cow.

She wasn’t just being silly, nor was this her typical morning tribute to Daddy…Sophia is terrified of cows. I’m not quite sure how it started. I think it has less to do with their heft and size than the fearsome sound of their lowing. My sister sent us a puzzle mat that had several buttons you could depress to hear the sound of an animal. Pushing the cow button immediately sent Sophia flying to the other end of the room. We tried some exposure therapy…Kevin or I holding her at a distance while the other pushed the button, but in the end we wound up putting the rug away until she outgrew her fear.

But so far she hasn’t. If we go somewhere new she’ll ask, apprehensively, if a cow will be there. And on the rare occasion that there is a cow—even an inanimate cow facsimile, such as the one you can pretend to milk at the local children’s museum—she will beg us to avoid it.

Sophia also has a fear of dogs. We are flanked, on either side, by neighbors with yippy dogs. Mostly harmless (one of them actually did bite the 14 year-old girl who mows our lawn) they’re brash, excitable, and bark their lungs out at Sophie (or a leaf caught in the wind, or their shadows, or my middle finger). So now every time we go out, Sophia makes a break from the house to the car, pleading, “The doggies won’t hurt you?”

This is something I can relate to. I am afraid of dogs. But unlike Sophia, who has never been attacked, the origin of my fear is quite clear (and justifiable) to me.

The first and most severe of attacks took place when I was in third grade. Jan, slow, overweight and outcast, sat behind me in homeroom. He invited the entire class to his birthday. Out of the 25 or so kids in that class, I was the only one who showed up. My mother dropped me off at a ramshackle ranch with a dirt yard and a gravel driveway. To the right, a large dog was chained to a stake in the ground and complained loudly upon my arrival. Jan was very pleased to see me. Together, we made a dent in the trayful of cupcakes his mother had baked, and I (a nerd in my own right) gave him a Little Professor calculator. With bruised pride, Jan told me that his dog was really dangerous, but he could pet him and did I want to see? (Even at eight, preserving his ego was more important to me than my own safety.) Sure, I did. I followed him outside and stood at what I figured was a safe distance. I must have miscalculated the length of the chain. The dog flew out from under Jan’s hand, which hung in the air, poised for petting.. He leapt on top of me, pinned me down and gnawed at the area above my right armpit. As in similar moments of crisis and great stress, everything slowed down. I was outside of myself, watching it happen: My own mouth opening to form a scream of terror. Jan’s mother, running out of the house to come pull the beast off of me. And what had Jan been doing? Screaming? Silently looking on? I don’t remember.

Ever since that day, I have not trusted dogs. I’ll cross the street to avoid them, ask my friends to put them away when I come to visit and scowl at those who let their mutts off leash in the park where I run. So it is hard for me to say whether my own tensing and hyperarousal has provoked fear in Sophia. Or if, independent of my own reaction, she has drawn her own conclusions about the trustworthiness of dogs. In an effort to ally her fears, I have become counter-phobic. I pet dogs. I say how cute they are. I point to their wagging tails and other indicators of friendliness. But, despite these efforts she retreats behind the safety of my thighs whenever there is a dog in our midst.

I have to wonder, if I was just honest about my fear, would she be as afraid? Is it my duplicity…or the fear itself that fuels her anxiety?

How does fear form? How do we come to understand that the world is a dangerous place—hazards at every turn. Car accidents. Poisons under the sink. Cows that moo. Dogs that bite. Is it a sudden confrontation with our mortality, our vulnerability? What provokes it? Early traumatic experience? Taking clues from parental anxieties?

Fear is anticipatory. It is of what might happen, not what is. Not even of what was.

It is a movement, then, from living in the moment, to a future orientation where bad things might happen? Perhaps the development of fear relates to an understanding of the linearity of time. Sophie often says “last week” for the past…whether something occurred months, weeks, or days ago. But I know she’s “getting it” that some things DID happen, that other things WILL happen. Those things that WILL happen are unknowns. She likes rehashing the past, or having me recount something that has happened, affirming her memory of the event, deriving comfort from the familiar.

But the future looms large and uncertain.

Which begs the question: Why does it have to be a dark future? Why can’t it be a happy future? Why doesn’t Sophia perceive a cow’s moo or a dog’s bark to be an expression of their essence, of their joy, as she does the roar of a lion or the hiss of a snake?

A friend recently postulated that perhaps death could be the best thing that happens to us.

Fear by its nature is irrational. Sometimes its “justified,” rooted in past experience and validated by neurotic parents and we can arrive at a satisfying explanation.

But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you’re just afraid of a cow. Whether it’s evil, good, or none of the above.