Eleanor had a nightmare last night.
She’s had bad dreams before, but this one seemed worse. Perhaps it was just that she’s finally able to describe the experience – but her panic and upset seemed greater than before as well. So I’m just calling it as the bad dream/nightmare threshold.
From what I could piece together through the sobs and muffled voice of someone who has their head buried in your shoulder, there were lots (swarms) of tiny ants crawling all over her left hand. And they didn’t bite her or hurt her, but they were scary.
She kept grabbing my arm and pinching it between her thumb and hand, though, so I wonder at that ‘not biting’ part.
We turned on lights and examined her hand and she confirmed there weren’t any ants there anymore. We went into her room and looked in and all around her bed and they weren’t there any more either. And we talked about nightmares and being scared and then waking up and being OK. And after a long while (OK, 10 minutes, but that’s a long time at 4am) she settled with daddy and pretty much immediately collapsed back into sleep.
Poor little one.
The first nightmare I remember, I would have been somewhere around 4-7, I think.
I wonder if she will remember this one. I wonder all the time about what memories she’s forming (though usually I’m wondering about happy memories).
Oh bless you Ramona. I have been wanting to post many things to the site, but I have so little that is interesting that it feels weird to see multiple boring posts. But I miss the family site being active. It used to be my home page, well it still is on Firefox, but lately I have been using Chrome and my home page there is my email. I intend to change that now that there is something to read. Don’t stop posting!!!
Poor Eleanor. Yes, obviously the ants were biting, she just didn’t recognize it as biting. I don’t know when nightmares start so I did a search and the answer was any time but they generally start between 3 and 6. I guess she’s right there in the early normal range. Still, poor little thing. Nightmares can be hard.