Just woke up from my first dream about ineffectually looking after a kid. I assume there will be others. It’s panicky, like the dreams you have when you have a major role in a play and you dream you’ve forgotten all the lines.
Can’t really remember the beginning of the dream, but somehow I end up responsible for looking after an old schoolfriend’s kid. We’re not particularly close [in the dream or in real life], but for some reason Neil has asked me to take care of his son.
Anyway, in the dream the little boy is old enough to articulate some of his feelings, but young enough to still be wearing nappies. I wake up and he has run himself a bath, stripped off his nappy and got in. I feel a wave of relief and guilt that the water’s the right temperature, and begin to wash him, knowing that after the bath he’s going to have to explain to me how to put a nappy on him. Little bits of shit are floating around in the water. But I push that to the back of my mind as he begins to tell me how lonely he is at the nursery, because all the other kids have mummies and daddies, but his are divorced.
I know that I’m looking after him because his father asked him to. But the kid atarts talking about how wonderful his mummy is. Kathleen. Now I remember Kathleen [in the dream and in real life] from school as a dumb slag, but I go along with it, and agree with him, because he’s clearly not been able to convince the other kids at nursery of his mother’s worth.
I take him out of the bath and wrap him in a big towel, and sit him on my lap and turn on the TV. I remember I always used to love being envelope in a big fluffy towel after I’d just got out of the bath. But then the film on the TV is, like, American Pie or something, (it’s a comedy about sex, anyway) and I realise:
a) the rating for this film is too high for him
b) sitting here with someone else’s naked child on my lap lays me open to accusations of kiddie-fiddling.
That wakes me up.
I won’t be listing all my dreams on here, even though I suspect there will be others, because reading other people’s dreams are mostly boring. But as it was the first about kids since I found out we were pregnant, I wondered why it had those components?
