The DreamMaker™

“That one.” Her pudgy finger points at the image of a round rumped bear, smiling over its shoulder on the screen.

“Again?”

“Again!”

“You don’t want to try something different?”

Her eyebrows knit, gentle undulations in the smoothness of her skin. “That one!” She is insistent.

“Ok, Bear Prepares for Winter it is.” Rachel kisses the child between her eyes, where troubled waters have returned to creaseless calm as fast as the wind whipped up. “Night night my darling. Sweet dream.” She presses play, and leaves her, curled amidst her pillows and soft toys in the soft glow of her night light.

Rachel goes downstairs, pours herself a glass of wine, and melts onto the sofa. “We should downgrade our subscription.”

Her husband looks up from the tablet he holds in his lap. “The bear again?”

“Every night since New Year.”

“That’s only three weeks, to be fair.” Marcus isn’t ready to downgrade yet. They waited the two and a half years recommended by paediatricians before getting a DreamMaker, despite what all their friends had said, and in the month since he only wished they had done it sooner. The promotional bundle had come with the DreamMaker unit and one month of free premium dream streaming. Not only is Nola finally sleeping soundly through the night, but the four simultaneous user capacity means that he no longer wakes up stressed from work dreams, and actually looks forward to going to bed. Some of the premium content is distinctly worth paying for.

Rachel might feel the same if she wasn’t still refusing to plug in. Even though Nola hasn’t screamed for her in the night since unwrapping the DreamMaker and handing it, disinterested, to Marcus, Rachel insists she needs to be ready, easily woken, in case Nola needs her. “Use the Listening feature, it’ll wake you if it detects any of 50 different types of noise!” Marcus has poured over the instruction manual and turned off all but “Fire” and “Nuclear Alert Siren.” Not that he has told Rachel.

But Rachel still remains sceptical, and it does not surprise Marcus now to hear her suggest a downgrade. In two days, the premium subscription will come out of their bank account, committing them to twelve months of dream streaming costing the same as the payments on their new car. “Look, how many nights has Nola had you up since Christmas?”

“None.” Rachel already looks defeated. She knows she has slept better. She knows Nola’s behaviour has been easier in the day too.

“Okay, and how many times has she been scared to go to bed?”

“I know Marcus, it’s just… it’s the same dream every night. Is that even good for her? And even if there’s no problem with having the same dream every night, if she’s always going to choose the bloody Bear, we could get that on the basic plan and still afford to take a trip somewhere this summer.”

Marcus thinks about some of the dreams he is still to dream. And the dreams he has streamed more than once. “Rach, I’m not worried, these dreams have been written by experts, I’m sure they’re, you know, optimised in some way. I don’t think there’s any harm in it. Kids do this. In a few weeks it’ll be something else, honestly. And I thought we were going to visit my parents this summer?”

*

Marcus is right. Three months later and Bear Prepares for Winter is a twice a week kind of a dream; The Happy Tea Party has taken over. Rachel is enacting a stiflingly dull afternoon tea for the third time that day when Marcus arrives home. It is only ten, and her first assumption is that he is unwell. She rises from where she has been sat, her knees up to her chest on the child size chair. “Marcus, are you ok?”

“I’m fine.” He doesn’t look fine and she waits for him to explain. “They called me in and said they're not happy with my work. Apparently it’s ‘lost its spark’ or something. I didn’t know what to do. So I came home.”

She wonders why that should mean he would come home, the old Marcus would have taken the feedback and figured out what to do with it. Now it looks as if he has just run away. “Lost its spark how?”

“I don’t know. They just said clients haven’t been happy and asked if everything was alright.”

Rachel has been wondering the same thing lately. “And is everything alright?”

“Honestly, I thought it was.” He has sat down now, folded onto the tiny chair while Nola goes on with her tea party as if nothing has happened. “But I don’t know now. They said it was formulaic. They said a computer could do it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m coming down with something. I just feel so fuzzy headed, I can't think.”

“Marcus?” she is tender now, squatting in front of him, bending and arching herself so that she can find his eyes beneath his lowered brow, come between him and the floor. “This has been going on while now, hasn’t it? I wonder if you’re working too hard?”

He allows himself to be led to bed, where he takes the phone from her, tells his manager he has gone home sick, then plugs in, allowing her to choose him a dream about finding his way home before the rain starts. She sets the timer for two hours and leaves him to rest.

She knows they are right, Marcus has lost his spark. She recalls the Valentine’s Day just gone. 12 red roses and a heart printed onto shiny white card, “all my love, Marcus”, just like it’s supposed to be. But the year before he had made the card, and when she opened it, a flower bloomed from folded paper. The year before that, she had cringed as he sung her a song he wrote, but laughed all the same, knowing it had been to please her. Marcus had always had spark, that little flash of creativity that brought colour to their lives, that found solutions when things looked impossible, that met her own sparks, so that they carried the torch that lit up their days and nights together. It was easy to put the shift down to the pressures of work, parenting, the winter blues even, but she wonders, now, whether there is more.

*

Marcus comes down at one, crumpled and sleepy eyed, but standing taller, Rachel is pleased to see. Nola is counting blocks on the table, one rounded hand moving the little wooden cubes from left to right, the other clutching a piece of half chewed apple she has been ignoring for ten minutes now. Marcus joins her at the table, lifting the cover from the sandwich Rachel has prepared for him. “What you doing baby girl?” he asks, his nap still rumbling in his throat.

“Counting.” Nola likes to count, reciting the numbers, one, all the way through to twenty. Rachel finds it frustrating she seems so disinterested in twenty one, but Nola just likes the feel of it, the steady, predictable pattern, invariable, safe.

“Come on darling, finish your apple and we’ll go have a little nap before open-day, okay?” Rachel is looking forward to the pre-school open day, she craves confirmation that pre-school is enriching, that she hasn’t been selfish in going back to a job that barely covers childcare. It isn’t Nola’s usual day, but her teacher said she can come in at three when the doors open to parents, and join in, no extra fee.

Nola notices the apple still clutched in her fist and releases it. “Ready for a nap” she says, reaching for Rachel. Rachel remembers the hours she spent walking Nola in her buggy, round and round the streets, waiting for her to surrender to sleep. Now she leads the way step by enormous step up the stairs and clambers into her bed, keen as a girl half a century older. “Tea Party today” she demands, leaving the kitchen without a backward glance at Marcus.

“Nola Tea Party is too long today, we have to get ready for open day. Daddy is going to come with us, isn’t that exciting?”

“Tea party!” There is that frown again, the cross pinch of the child’s face.

“How about Swinging With The Monkeys? Hmm? That looks fun?” Rachel tries to sound calm, certain, but she knows what is coming.

“WANT TEA PARTY!”

Nola is in tears now, her small body shuddering with betrayal. Rachel doesn’t want to face it. Worrying about Marcus, she doesn’t have the patience and besides, she knows it will take longer to have the fight than to just admit defeat and play the damn dream. She gives in, feeling her daughter’s body relax as she loads the programme, and goes down to clean up after lunch. When she gets downstairs, Marcus has gone back to bed.

*

The open day is busy with parents. The art, strange, bright coloured abstracts, reminds Rachel of her own pre-school, distant memories she feels the familiarity of rather than sees in her mind’s eye. But the noise is something different. The hubbub she expects alongside the bright artwork, diminutive furniture and peculiar mingled smell of paint, potato and antiseptic, is absent. Instead, children gather in quiet groups, talking softly in ordered calm. There is no shoving, no shouts of injustice. No clamour for attention or shrieking excitement at all. Near the back wall of Nola’s classroom, four boys are gathered around a train track, between them keeping the little wooden train circling round and around in an oval. There are five children painting at a low table, swoops of blue and green, and by the window, Nola sits with seven others, each offering another tea from a pink and yellow tea pot, lifting the pot high as an imaginary stream of hot water pours into the tiny plastic cups. Alone, on a bean bag, another little girl has built a teetering tower of blocks on the floor, her posture tightening against the inevitable fall.

“Nola is such a lovely little girl” the teacher is saying. “As you can see, she plays nicely with others, her number work is really good and she’s loving our role play area too.”

Rachel watches her daughter pass the milk, clumsy hands mimicking a delicacy as yet out of her reach. Behind her, the stack of bricks falls again, clattering to the floor. It is the third time in as many minutes, and this time, the little girl on the beanbag starts to cry. “Does Nola like the bricks?” Rachel asks.

“Oh she loves the bricks, she likes to count them!”

“Does she make towers?” A woman, maybe her parent, is bending down to the girl, talking to her, starting to gather the bricks again, laying one, encouraging the girl to lay another on top.

“No, it’s funny actually, Gloria is the only child we have who makes towers at the moment. Poor girl seems quite on her own sometimes.”

“The others don’t include her?”

“No, it isn’t that. She just prefers different games to the other children, and we do believe in allowing every child to flourish in their own way.”

“Yes.” Rachel is distracted, only half listening, watching the children pass the milk jug, one to another, on round the party until everyone has milk. “Any issues we should be aware of?” She is not sure what she is expecting, Reassurance?

“Well, there is something, and we are noticing this with a few of this class lately, but we do have some little upsets sometimes.”

“Upsets?”

“Yes, I mean, its very normal for children this age to have them, they have so much figuring out to do, don’t they? But we are noticing that Nola can get quite upset when things don’t go to plan.”

“Well that’s normal isn’t it? I mean, even adults can have a hard time with that, right? Like you say, at this age they’re figuring all that out.”

“Well I think that might be part of the issue. As you can see, we have a very harmonious group of children, which is lovely, of course, but they are perhaps not really encountering some of the situations that help them to learn how to BE in the world. They are excellent at sharing and we are so proud of how kind Nola is, but we have noticed, and please don’t think I am singling Nola out in saying this, that some of the children seem to be a little behind in what we would call solution making. It isn’t a big thing, and as you say, very normal for this age, but we have noticed that a few of the children seem to be struggling a bit with finding that kind of creative spark that prompts the more experimental style of interaction that you and I may have benefited from as children.”

Rachel does not know what to say and watches in silence as the tea party is laid out once more. The teacher is gentle, tentative in her tone. “May I ask, do you use a DreamMaker at home?”

“We do. She has slept so much better since we got it.”

“Oh, I understand, I used one for my own son for a year when he was seven.”

Rachel hears the implication. “Why did you stop?”

“Well, we just noticed a few changes we weren’t sure about and wondered whether it might be the DreamMaker.”

“Changes? What kind of changes?”

“His learning was, how can I put it, slowing down? He just didn’t seem to be picking things up as fast. Didn’t seem as interested. He used to love making stuff, you know, sticking carboard tubes to bits of paper and calling it a plane, that kind of thing. Once he tried to make a lock for his bedroom door out of card, bless him, but he just lost interest in all of that. And then, he was struggling in his friendships a bit too. In the end, his only friends at school were the other children who were also using the DreamMaker and that sort of made us wonder if that was the issue.”

On the beanbag, Gloria is beaming at her tower, standing firm on a new four brick base. Satisfied, she slices it through the middle, sending it tumbling back to the ground. “What happened?”

“Nothing. We stopped the DreamMaker and eventually things settled back down. I know they say it makes people calmer and everything, but I just wonder at what cost, for myself.”

*

Rachel gives herself until Friday. Three seductive nights of quiet. She lies awake, savouring the peace, tasting the last morsels of calm. On Friday, she attaches the headset and selects one golden dream, a half hour of transcendent balm. Then she destroys the DreamMaker, and braces herself for the fallout.