Monday, September 22, 2008

Seeing spiders

Lucy started having nightmares a few weeks ago. They are sweaty, screaming, scary nightmares and all of them involve spiders. I don't know why. Spiders really don't come up in our daily lives. They are around, but she never really seems to notice them. But at night she sees them crawling in her room, building webs in and around her bed and they scare her to pieces. I have had to jump on the spiders, wrestle with them and wisk them off to the other room, making a big production of slamming the garbage can lid so that she is convinced that I have rid her room of them. We flip on all the lights to show her that there are no webs in her room. I make sure to vacuum the corners of her room, with her supervision, during the day so that I can tell her that we got them all out when she is screaming about them at night.
Tonight when I went in to calm her down she accidentally spilled water all over her bed. I turned on the lights to show her their were no webs, no spiders and to change her sheets. She was sitting in her rocking chair and started laughing hysterically. I looked over and she said, "I thought there were two great big spider webs in my room, but they were just ghosts."
She was ok with that. Lights out and nighty night. We'll assume the ghosts were part of her dreams as well, and now, I'm sure, they will be part of mine.

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