Enjoying: A morning at a new playground with the twins. Actually, the playground was only new to us since it was the first time we'd ever been there. Most of the equipment looked like it dated from the 1970's: metal seesaws and sliding boards and whirlygigs--all those gloriously unsafe playground equipment I remember from my own childhood

Halloween Candy Observations: I always knew that Nestle Crunch and Hershey's Krackle bars were essentially the same, but did you know that Nestle's Butterfinger and Hershey's 5th Avenue bars are also the virtually the same? And why is that I only ever see Goldenberg's peanut chews at Halloween?

Tab's Bad Dream

The other day I was working on the computer downstairs at about 2 in the morning, finishing another job for the Press, when I heard a horrible moaning from upstairs. It was a spooky sort of "Whooooo...whoooooo...WHOOOOO!" I recognized it immediately as Tab in the throes of a bad dream. He is liable to have nightmares whenever he gets stressed or overtired. He hasn't had one in quite a while, however.

I sat frozen at the keyboard, wondering what to do. I was afraid he'd awaken the boys, but I knew if I went upstairs and tried to wake him up, his dream mind would transform me into the evil specter in his nightmare. The noise steadily increased in volume until it reached a deafening crescendo. Then, after what seemed like forever, but was probably only about a minute, he stopped abruptly.

A few minutes later he stumbled downstairs on his way to the bathroom, looking pale and shaken. He mumbled a few words to me about his nightmare, in which he was a cop and had to view a murder scene with multiple victims killed in a horrific manner. Then he went back upstairs.

I went to bed around 4 a.m. and attached my booklight to my current book. No matter how late it is, I still need to read a few minutes before I can relax enough to fall asleep. I had only read a few paragraphs when Tab started moaning loudly again. I woke him up before he got too loud, and he told me that his police dream had continued. In this dream he was riding in a police car over a bridge; the car was overcrowded, and he was hanging out the door and afraid of falling out into the river below.

Fortunately, that was the end of his bad dreams for the night. The next day, I asked the boys if they had heard Daddy yelling and told them that he'd had a nightmare.

"What did he dream about?" Daniel wanted to know.

Without going into too many of the frightening details, Tab told them a little about his bad dream.

"Daddy yelled in his sleep?" asked Matthew, incredulous.

"Yes, he did. Did you hear him?" I asked.

None of the boys had heard him, but they were curious about Tab's bad dream and questioned him over and over about it. I think they were surprised to learn that even Daddy--the all-knowing, all-powerful Daddy--could be scared.

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