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There are two kinds of children: ones that mostly have good dreams, and ones that mostly have bad ones. My name is Norton Splat, and I had bad dreams—only bad dreams.

This is a scary bedtime story. But I’m afraid there is no other choice. After all, this is called The Book of Bad Dreams.

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Each night my mother tucked me into bed, trapping me tightly between the sheets. “Don’t forget the corners,” I would say. “That’s where the bad dreams creep in.”

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Tightly tucked corners, no matter how tightly tucked, didn’t stop me from waking up with an awful dream. So I crawled out of bed and into my parents’ bedroom, careful not to stir up any more nightmares.

I’ve never had a bad dream there—but of course they don’t sleep so well!

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“Let’s buy you a nightlight,” suggested mother. I picked it out myself—an oak tree with lighted acorns hanging from the branches.

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But the next night I woke up again with an awful, frightening dream.

“They were throwing acorns,” I explained, crawling into my parents’ bed.

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I asked everywhere for help. No doubt the garbage man, a tall and heavy man strong enough to lift two pails over his head, wasn’t afraid of anything.

“Blow your bad dreams away,” he told me, taking in a deep, deep breath until his cheeks were as round, red and full as can be.  “Blow them as far as you can!”

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I spent the whole night blowing. The awful, frightening, terribly bad dreams held on to the bed, to the dresser, to the curtains, and the ceiling lamp. What’s worse, they seemed to enjoy it.

“Yipee!” they laughed.

Poor me! By morning I was entirely out of breath.

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Our neighbor was a jazz musician. “Music calms the restless mind,” he crooned, his saxophone waving in the air.

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Who knew these bad dreams made an awful, frightening, terribly unavoidable 12-piece orchestra?

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The mailman suggested mailing the bad dreams away. A few awful, frightening, terribly unavoidable, cackling bad dreams later and I had collected enough to stuff a very large envelope. I licked it shut and sent it to a place I thought very far away.

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But the next day the envelope returned. Those same bad dreams crawled out of the envelope, hooted and hollered for hours.

“What a delightful vacation!” said one. “Time for bed,” said another…

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Sigmund, my most sensible teddy bear, had another suggestion. “Just put them in your pockets.”

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From the looks of it, the awful, frightening, terribly unavoidable, cackling and stubborn bad dreams seemed to be multiplying.

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Fish don’t have bad dreams, I learned at the aquarium.

The next night, when the awful, frightening, terribly unavoidable, cackling and stubbornly crafty bad dreams came, I went to sleep in the bathtub.

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“Obviously,” I deduced, “fish don’t get much sleep either!”

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I tried a great many more suggestions. I hazarded singing at the top of my lungs…

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but that woke up the neighbors.

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I tried climbing out of reach…

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but all night they waited for me down below.

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I tried compromising…

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but they raided across the border.

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There was nothing else to do. I came up with an idea of my own. I took out all my pens, gathered all the crayons, watercolors, pastels, and drawing paper.

The bad dreams grew closer. As they hunched over my shoulder, using my two pickiest fingers I plucked one and placed it flat onto the paper. I turned the page—splat!—then added some more.

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And when I was done, I had something awful, frightening, terribly unavoidable, cackling, stubborn and delightfully crafty.

So I called it The Book of Bad Dreams.

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Every morning when I wake up I draw the bad dreams from the night before. Strangely, there seem to be fewer and fewer. Maybe all of us are more comfortable there, trapped between the sheets.

The End

b.z. humdrum

The Book of Bad Dreams is unpublished. Please do not distribute. For more information please .

or visit bzhumdrum.com