My Darling B had a bad dream the other night. She dreamed that she woke up and saw somebody standing in the doorway. It was one of those dreams where she knew she was dreaming, and she knew that if she called out to me I’d wake her up and everything would be all right, so she managed to murmur my name in a wan little voice …

Most of the time, B sleeps on her right side, facing away from me, but when she had this dream she was sleeping on her left side, facing me. I was sleeping on my back. And, as luck would have it, her face was just an inch, maybe two, from my ear, so what she murmured came to me as a howl. I woke scrambling to get untangled from the blankets to see who was yelling at me, and that woke B, and we both woke the cats, so that everybody was jumping around, throwing blankets everywhere and raising a wild ruckus.

When my heart slowed down to about 120 beats a minute from about a thousand, I managed to catch my breath and ask B, “What?”

“…I had a bad dream,” was all she could say. And all she needed to say, anyway.