Dreaming

Chris has had his fair share of bizarre dreams involving Charlotte, which usually involve her falling in some way, and I have, too. For several weeks, I woke up every single night, lunging to stop Charlotte from falling off our bed. Of course, all threats were only in my head, as my darling girl slept soundly—and safely confined—in her crib. The other night, Chris and my scary Charlotte dreams weirdly coincided. In my dream, Charlotte was taking a bath in a too-full tub. She lost her balance sitting up and quickly slipped under the water. I jolted up in bed and grabbed Chris’s arm, thinking it was Charlotte’s arm, and yanked—hard!—to pull her up from under the water. Well, that woke me up, and it also woke Chris. See, he had had his arm strangely raised toward me at the exact moment I went grabbing for it. He had been in the midst of his own Charlotte dream in which she been crawling along the sectional in the family room and was about to go off the edge. He had put his arm up to block her and keep her from falling. So there we were, in the middle of the night, staring at each other wide-eyed, our hearts pounding with the narrow misses we both felt we had experienced. How odd that we had both dreamed about threats to our girl at the exact same moment, and we both intervened at the exact same moment. It kind of makes you wonder if, after spending SO MUCH time together, your minds sort of land on a similar subconscious wavelength or something. Or, maybe it was just coincidence. But we’ve all had weird moments like this, such as when I dreamed my parents’ dishwasher broke, only to find out the next day that, um, their dishwasher had just broken, or when my dad jumped out of bed at the exact minute Charlotte was born on January 30, racing downstairs to check the answering machine. He felt certain something had just happened—and it had. Eerie or fun or divinely inspired, depending on how you look at it!