Monsters Under the Bed and the Lies We Tell

I heard him crying just after 10. From what I could get out of him, it sounded like a bad dream. Whatever it was, he was clearly upset about it. He didn’t say much about its content beyond something indiscernible about a gas station.

There haven’t been many of these for him — him being just three years old. When I heard the soft putters from down the hall, my parenting intuition did not initially register “nightmare.” Instead I was taken back to one of the first times I heard similar whimpers on the night we learned that a) yes, there can be too much of a good thing and b) having eyes for mac and cheese that are bigger than young stomachs for mac and cheese is an early milestone of childhood development. That night had ended in all parties involved becoming unhappily refamiliarized with the too generous of a portion, though in a slightly less appetizing form.

But a troubled mind can be trickier business than a troubled stomach, for man and child alike. The body can trigger mechanical processes to purge excesses of food and drink, but purging a disturbing thought, an implanted memory, a troublesome dream — that is not as hardwired.

Perhaps the “common sense” thing to say would have been, “There, there, little boy. It was only a dream. There’s no reason to be troubled. Hush now, little one. There’s no trouble at the gas station.” This is as if to say that comfort can be taken and fear dispelled because the source of the anxiety was but a mere illusion. Such nightly fantasies can just be shrugged off. Just roll over and go back to sleep.

Is this true? A half-truth? A half-lie?

Have you ever dreamt that you lost someone you love dearly, and spending nights and days in that shadow world you dream you mourn, you dream you weep, you dream you just begin to come to terms with the illusionary reality of this dreamt-up death, then you wake, and you spend minutes, maybe the whole morning, trying to put aside that sadness and realize your mother/brother/sister/father/friend is not in the ground, not yet? Was that all an illusion? Just a dream?

The chronological facts were not so. Those weren’t real funerary rites that you didn’t really sit through and weep during. But you felt real sorrow, real fear of loss, real trying to make sense of the senselessness of death. The premise was phantasmic, but the pain was palpable.

St. Thomas says that “the cause of dreams is sometimes in us and sometimes outside us”:

The inward cause of dreams is twofold: one regards the soul, in so far as those things which have occupied a man's thoughts and affections while awake recur to his imagination while asleep. A such like cause of dreams is not a cause of future occurrences, so that dreams of this kind are related accidentally to future occurrences, and if at any time they concur it will be by chance. But sometimes the inward cause of dreams regards the body: because the inward disposition of the body leads to the formation of a movement in the imagination consistent with that disposition; thus a man in whom there is abundance of cold humors dreams that he is in the water or snow: and for this reason physicians say that we should take note of dreams in order to discover internal dispositions. In like manner the outward cause of dreams is twofold, corporal and spiritual. It is corporal in so far as the sleeper's imagination is affected either by the surrounding air, or through an impression of a heavenly body, so that certain images appear to the sleeper, in keeping with the disposition of the heavenly bodies. The spiritual cause is sometimes referable to God, Who reveals certain things to men in their dreams by the ministry of the angels, according Numbers 12:6, "If there be among you a prophet of the Lord, I will appear to him in a vision, or I will speak to him in a dream." Sometimes, however, it is due to the action of the demons that certain images appear to persons in their sleep.

I suppose there is difficulty in knowing the cause or causes of any particular nightly episode, but the cause does not alter in any way the experience as experience, and there exists remedies compatible with divers causes.

A few nights before my son’s dream, unbeknownst to him but not to the electro-literate locals like myself, a gas station near our neighborhood was the scene of aggression and violence. Masked men punched a woman, waved weapons, took and stole and harmed.

In the 1976 The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Chief Inspector Clouseau asks the innkeeper, “Does your dog bite?” The man says, “No.” Clouseau reaches down to pet the dog, but the dog yips and growls and snaps. “I thought you said your dog did not bite,” Clouseau says incredulously. “That is not my dog,” says the innkeeper.

“There’s no monsters under your bed, son.” Monsters might not be under the bed tonight, but they can and do whisper in the ears of the young and old and middle-aged in the darkness of the night — that’s their hour. Sometimes they prowl about like a lion. Sometimes they crawl about on their bellies. Sometimes they walk right into the front door and say, “Empty the cash register.” Sometimes they sit and Tweet.

O, but how often we lie to our sons and daughters. No, my child, the fairies and giants and beasts that visit you in the night are all goodly and docile and come bearing gifts! But at what cost do we do this?

Think of how parents-made-priests prepare for the yearly ritual. Hear the sleigh bells jingling now as the procession approaches, born aloft by pairs of heavenly beings. The offertory chant is sung, describing the stillness of all the earth and even its littlest creatures before the great sacrifice. The victims are set out on the altar, ready to be offered to the fat-bellied one who dwells under the light of the North Star on the mountain at the top of the world, now descending on this night of nights to bring hope and joy to little children asleep in their beds. At midnight the priests eat and drink of the offering, the cookies and the milk, a communion with a god they do not believe in but they now embody, doing his work in the world.

And the horror of not keeping up this ritual! It is too much for some parents to bear. I once read of a prelate who in passing referenced the evolution of St. Nicholas into the modern figure of Santa Claus, this before a group of fifth- and sixth-graders. When the parents got wind of this, there was quite the uproar. One parent was quoted as saying, “Santa is the last pure thing in a child’s life.” If that were true we’d all be damned.

To safeguard the purity of children we raise up this image of Santa, that all who may look upon the NORAD Santa Tracker may have hope in their hearts. Do we suppose the mystery of a 58" waist and a big bag of elf-made toys somehow sliding down a chimney is better suited to light the flame of hope in our children’s hearts than God-made-manchild?

Before Coca-Cola invented Santa and dentistry, St. Nicholas was a saint who celebrated Christmas as the Nativity of our Lord, and on a separate night so as to not steal the show, he would enlist the help of parents to leave little coins and candies in children’s shoes. He asked for no sacrifice, no oblation, no adoration to be given to himself, no lies be told. And children and parents delighted with merry-making.

Plato had Socrates down as praising what he called the “noble falsehood” in Republic, a make-believe origin myth for a society that would keep each about his own business. An attack on this noble lie is taken as an attack on the polis herself, an act of treason that cannot be tolerated. But even more damaging to a society than one of her members challenging such a lie is the lie itself.

A lie is a posit at variance with the mind. To attempt to create anything, to build, to develop upon a foundation laid in spite of its own blueprints, against the better judgement of its own builder — what futility, what hopelessness!

When we lie to our children, we rob them of true comfort. “Spot didn’t die; he went to live on the farm.” Even more than denying the death of a pet, to say this would deny the parental aid that is owed. It is an act of injustice. The child doesn’t need or deserve a lie; he needs a hug, a tear shed in common, a trip for ice cream.

I heard him crying just after 10. It was a bad dream. I don’t know or need to know if there’s monsters under his bed, and he doesn’t know or need to know that the world is full of them. He doesn’t need any more illusions tonight. I pick him up. I sing a Pater. I sprinkle Holy Water and ask God to send His holy angel from heaven to watch over, to cherish, to protect, to abide with, and to defend all who dwell in this house. I lay him back down. I tell him I love him, and he goes back to sleep.