Danny was sick with a fever and stayed home today. Late tonight, after everyone else had gone to bed, I heard some stirring upstairs.

Danny was awake in bed. He had had a bad dream and gotten up to open his door. When I asked him what the bad dream was about, he said, “Woodmakers.”

“Woodmakers?” I asked, not sure I had heard right.

“Yeah. They were big,” he said.

“You mean like carpenters?”

“Yeah, carpenters.”

He couldn’t tell me a lot. There were ships. The woodmakers would make a noise if he tried to escape. He said he had had the dream before.

“What makes you think of them as woodmakers? Do they have axes?”

“No. I don’t think they had tools…. I think they had nails.”

I told him that when I had fevers as a kid, I used to have bad dreams. A lot of times I would wake up sweating, and that’s seemed to be right when the fever broke and went away.

“Did you wake up sweating?” I asked him.

“No.”

Oh well. I decided to let him go back to sleep.

Danny & Alex