I had a bad dream last night.

I won’t bore you with the diddly details that dreams are filled with, we’ll skip to the end. Bear was little and we were sitting on our bed which wasn’t our bed but somehow also our bed on the second story of the dream house. Not my dream house but the house in my dream. It’s convoluted, I know, I don’t make dream rules.

I was having that sort of Very Serious Talk™ you have with little people about, I believe, keeping better track of her necklaces (insert enormous eye roll here) when I looked out a window and saw a fully formed tornado about fifty feet from the house.

Disclaimer: I’m terrible at distance. Suffice to say the tornado was enormous and close enough that in the blink of an eye I dismissed the idea of getting to another room.

So I snatched Bear up and tucked her under me as I crouched beside the bed. I shielded her while furiously whispering, “It’s just big wind, it’s just big wind, it’ll be over soon.” And it was big wind and it passed over the house without tearing us into the sky and dreamworld went on.

Y’ALL. When I say I woke up sobbing.

It doesn’t take Freud to figure this one out, except I guess maybe it does because seconds after waking I was certain I knew what this dream was about and an hour later I’m not so sure.

I’m feeling helpless with so many things bearing down on us. I want so badly to protect her from the world but there’s a damn tornado coming and as BrightSide put it you can’t stop nature.

And now that I’m rereading this I also think maybe it’s about why are we worrying about things like putting away necklaces when there’s a tornado coming. There are bigger threats.

I can tell I’ll be thinking on this all day.