Pete usually gets up right about 7:30 in the morning, but he slept in this morning. That isn’t entirely unheard of, especially on rainy, overcast mornings such as we’re having today. Even then, though, he rarely sleeps past 8am. So when 8:30 rolled around and I still hadn’t heard from him, I decided to go wake him up.

(His sister is a Champion Sleeper-Inner. She gets that from me. She slept until 9:30 on this especially dark and restful morning. She usually gets up at 8:30. When I wake her up.)

Petey was curled up on his bed, his thumb in his mouth and his blankey firmly clutched in his little fist. His eyes opened as soon as I walked into his room.

“Hey buddy,” I said. “You sure have slept a long time this morning.”

“Well,” he said, “there was a snake on my bed. It popped up.”

Mentioning snakes and beds in the same breath is not the way to put me in my most rational mind, so I had about half a second of panic before I realized that it was much more likely that he’d been dreaming than that we’d been invaded by pop-up snakes. I pulled him into my lap and assured him that it had been a dream, and we cuddled there in the floor for a few minutes before heading off for to brush his teeth.

Later, he told me more about the dream.

The snake sneaked up on me three times, and then he sneaked up on me no more. And then a shark came, and then I didn’t stomp on the snake. And then nothing happened. I just shooted the shark with my eyes. I closed my eyes, and I shooted him when I closed my eyes. And then he wasn’t caming back, and the snake wasn’t.

That sounds like a really horrible dream for a 3-year-old. Or for a 32-year-old, for that matter. I’m not sure where Pete’s fear of snakes came from — unless it’s genetic — but I’m relatively certain the garden eels we saw at the aquarium didn’t help matters. They freaked him out, and he’s asked several times since why “those snakes popped up.”