All I want to do is dream…..

Matty recently started to have a clear understanding of what dreams are and that there are good ones and bad ones. Dreams are so abstract that I find having to explain what exactly it is to my kids really hard… it is there but not quite there… intangible and tangible at the same time. I used to tell Matty that it is in the mind and only happens when he is sleeping, and what he dream of are usually about things that are constantly on his mind during the day. I didn’t think that was a clear enough explanation but anything more than that will be way too mind-boggling for a pre-schooler to handle.

The school probably did a good job somewhere along the line and I knew about it because one fine day about two months ago, Matty just blurted out of the blue that he hated bad dreams and he has been having them almost every night (which also explained why he kept waking up in the middle of the night… ermmm like that is anything new?). He couldn’t narrate any of the details but could only tell me it bothered him. Surely he has to know what dream is in order for him to tell me all that.

Over the next couple of days, he started to ask why we have bad dreams, why he can see himself in his dreams, why is it that sometimes he can remember what he dreamt about but not all the time, what I had dreamt of in the past and which is my favourite and worst dream.

Matty told me once a few weeks back that his favourite dream is of the family having ice-cream together which I absolutely forgot about (the problem with having kids is that they remember everything but not the parents). Yesterday when we were talking about dreams again, he asked if I knew which was his favourite dream, my instant reaction was to get him to tell me because I didn’t know and I was slapped right in the face with “I told you before right? It was about us having ice-cream together”. Obviously the content of the dream, even though something simple was a pure bliss to this 5-year old to make him want to label it as his best dream.

Today while holding my hand on the way to school, Matty asked if I dreamt last night. It was like hot topic of the week and had turned up as conversation topic two days in a row. He told me that he dreamt of him and his gong gong at the seaside and gong gong asking him if he wants to go to the airport. He replied with a yes and the dream ended there... and that to me was pure bliss - having my boy share with me a part of him on a daily basis.