  Saturday morning, an unhappy Cara crawled into bed with me, "Mommy, I had a bad dream..." With her growing vocabulary, her descriptions of her dreams is getting really interesting. She crawled up in bed with me, I listened and reassured her that it was just a dream, and she fell back to sleep.
Well, some sort of strange role reversal must have happened. Cara's dream had been full of bad guys and good guys, dialogue and even jail cells. Then, I closed my eyes and came face to face with a monster. Your classic running from the long snouted, snarling, horned, monster dream. Quite typically, at the climactic moment, I jumped and woke myself up. Cara rolled over, ready to talk again, and it was my turn to share a bad dream. There we were, 8:00 in the morning, talking about our nightmares. But there was no, "Don't worry, mommy, it's not real. " No reassurances or distractions from thinking about it. She wanted to know what happened next.
Did the monster eat her and Adia? Did I kill the monster? Maybe there were other monsters with him? What happened next was that I woke up and realized I had been dreaming. It was all just a bad dream. Reality was snuggled up next to me, with her head on my shoulder and so much stronger than the monsters beneath my bed. (forgive the Indigo Girl's lyric theft) 
