I've been having those strange dreams again.
Abby isn't feeling well. She's come down with another chest cold, it seems. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come in her health, although I know that little kids get sick more easily because they haven't yet built up an immunity. I hope that's all it is.
She was up hacking last night, which is pretty concerning to me. I never thought I would be the parent who held the mirror under my kid's nose while she was sleeping to see if she was still breathing, but I'm unreformably neurotic in regard to two sounds: Coughing and stair thumping noises.
As an example, last night Berta had put Abby in bed and had come back downstairs looking for the Vicks I bought last month (which we never found). I was looking in unlikely places, like the dining room, when I heard a noise. To my addled brain this noise sounded like the plastic gate being climbed by a small child, then coming loose and falling down the stairs.
I lept across the foyer and darted around the corner to the stairs, where I found everything still in order. I can't imagine what I must have looked like, zipping around the house like a madman, as if when I got there I would be able to do anything to prevent what I had already heard.
Do you ever do that? Position yourself so that you are close enough to something that you could prevent something bad from happening? Has it ever worked? I think I might have been "called to action" while in these positions maybe twice, to good success. Maybe that's why I keep doing it.
For example, maybe you see some kid at the mall playground who is leaning a little farther out of the playhouse-on-stilts than he should be. So you get yourself close enough that you could catch him if he falls, but far enough that people don't think you're insane. Yeah, I'm doing stuff like that all the time, and not necessarily only (but particularly) for my own kid.
Anyway, Abby was coughing most of the night, which is my other trigger besides stair noises. (I think Berta had knocked something over in the computer room looking for the Vicks container, but I'm still not sure what caused that sound.) I sat in her room for a while, just listening to her breathe, anxious to do something for her but completely without anything to do.
There was a kind of turning point last evening, though, when she yawned in her sleep. It was a good, healthy yawn. It made pretty clear that she could breathe easily if she really wanted to.
I think my fear in this stems from that time I was sick back in high school and the medication I was on (stupid doctor) was doing nothing. I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. I ran down to my parent's bedroom, choking on myself, unable to make any vocal noise, much less able to tell them what was going on. I guess my body took on its own defenses at that point because the vomiting that followed seemed to clear my airway.
I wouldn't want that possibility to occur with Abby. I mean, would she make it over to our room? Would she know to come to us? Logic tells me that she would. After all, she comes to visit us at night simply "whenever". But my irrational fear comes into play there.
I've strayed so far from where I started...
Abby was sick and in the middle of the night she somehow materialized in our bed. I knew this because I kept getting slapped and kicked. This is how Abby sleeps. Berta and I speculated this morning about whose genes this behavior descends from, and we both agreed that it's probably her family, since Mary Ann is well known for kickboxing in her sleep.
Anyway, between the slapping and kicking I was having strange dreams. I don't remember exactly what they contained. I do remember that there was significant reference to the book I was reading before I went to bed last night.
I started reading Quicksilver again. It's intersting how the passing of a few months can change your perspective on a book. In one philosophy class, I've learned enough to make a difference in the reading of the attitudes of the charaters in this book, specifically how it pertains to "Natural Philosophy".
My dreams were filled with metaphysics and epistemologies. And there was the armageddon.
It's weird how so many things I've been experiencing lately have to do with the end of things. I saw the movie Armageddon on TV the other day. There was a web site link that I followed today that asked what you would do if you only had four hours left to live. And I read a thing yesterday about the effects of a nuclear blast.
It's probably not the best bed time reading, but did you know that if a nuclear bomb with a 300 megaton yield (that's average by today's standards) was detonated a mere 1500 feet above the Pentagon that the light from the explosion (not the explosion itself or the blast, but the light that it produces) would melt aluminum surfaces of planes at Regan International Airport, about 1.6 miles away? The tires of the planes would catch on fire, as would the plane interiors, and the fueling hoses (which are filled with gas) from service vehicles. This is from the light. Four seconds later, the blast would hit.
So anyway, there was a lot of empirical testing going on in my dreams, and then there would be world destruction, and suddenly -slap- I'm awake in bed mumbling things about philosophy, moving Abby back to parallel. This happened several times before I noticed that Berta wasn't in bed any more, and the clock read 6:something-late and it was just too much to steal blankets back (because somehow Abby had gotten one leg on top of a sheet and the other wrapped around a blanket) and so I layed there for a while.
Not much sleep, there. Tonight, there will be vap-o-rub or cough medicine.
