Dreamcatcher - The Legend

Above me, the dreamcatcher hung, a circle, woven in a web of cotton, all in black, so I couldn't see it in the darkness. But I knew it was there. I reached out to feel the feathers hanging from the bottom. They were tattered and worn from the repeated touch of fingers.

Dad had given me the dreamcatcher. Before the silences, before the fights, had come the first bad dream. The night he had been elected to Parliament , he and Kate had come home to find me white and shaking, clutching the baby-sitter, refusing to sleep.

'The waves will get me,' I told them. 'They're pulling me under. In the dream.' Kate had held me and stroked my hair until the trembling stopped. But it had been Dad who carried me back to bed, who sat with me and talked. Dad who rose at last and fetched something from a dusty tin in his study and let me unwrap it from the bed of tissues, yellow with age.

'My father gave me this.' And his voice was quiet when he told me the story. Ancient people believed that in the darkness bad dreams got tangled in the threads and were burned away in the first rays of morning sun.

'And the good dreams?' I was holding on to him, pleading with him to stay.

'And the good dreams ...' He had smiled. 'The good dreams always get through.'

  (Dreamcatcher, page 15)