DREAM TWENTY-FOUR

I have A LOT of dreams where my husband and I are looking for a new house.  Last night, we went to the city next door to check out a place that had been recommended to us.  It had a lot of thick, dark and dusty rugs, harvest gold and avocado green.  There was a stairway on the second floor with heavy locks high up on the door.    I was getting a very creepy 1970s vibe from this place.  (For the record, the 1970s have always given me a stranger danger feeling.  It makes me think of serial killers, the sons of abusive WWII vets with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, and children dressed in awkwardly short shorts.  The whole decade just reeks of maladaptive behavior to me, and it can go bye-bye for all I care.)  

Anyway, I looked at the two rooms that were supposed to be for our two kids.  The first one had a closet connected to a crawl space.  Like, the wall in the closet came down to about two feet from the ground and if I knelt down and pushed aside a heavy drape I could see the opening give way to this enormous dark room.  I used the light on my phone to get a sense of size of this hidden space and it was very large.  Almost gymnasium sized, with hard wood resin-sealed gym floors.  I went to the second kids’ bedroom and found the same kind of opening to the same large room.  Maybe it was directly connected to the room and not through the closet.  This time I pushed past the drape and entered the space.  

Suddenly, it was lit and walking and crawling around this room were children.  Maybe 15 or 20 kids.  Some were toddlers and others were older, maybe 8 or 10, but there were no teenagers.  I asked them who they were and why they were there.  They said they were there because they were 'bad' and they were being punished.  It was a nursery room, I guess, or a child’s prison because there were no toys.  The kids just milled about.

I left the room and went looking for my husband to show him what I had found.  The people who wanted to sell the house were there in the bedroom and I asked one of their kids if they had ever been in the crawl space before.  I asked, have you ever seen or spoken to the children?  This little kid, maybe 5 or 6 twisted his hands around while he spoke and averted his eyes, clearly uncomfortable with my question.  He said, "no, I don't know what you are talking about," but he was lying.  

Then it occurred to me, he couldn't speak the truth, because if he did, he would join the other kids.  He would be stolen away like they were.  These children were in some sort of purgatory and the kids in the room had gone missing, taken from the house, (by the house?) many generations ago.  I crawled back under the space and yelled to the house, or to whatever thing that trapped these children, "If you treat children with kindness, they will turn out good!" 

And then louder, "IF YOU TREAT CHILDREN WITH KINDNESS, THEY WILL TURN OUT GOOD!"  But the lights remained dark, like nobody was listening.  

Okay, whew!  I just had to write that down somewhere.  But yeah, let’s remember that, folks.  Treat children with kindness and they will not be vessels of pain that perpetuate harm to future generations.