Prompt: Every so often a dream catcher must be 'emptied' of the nightmares it has caught. Who does it and what do they see?
A young child lay sleeping on her bed with sweet dreams filling her mind. All thanks for the dream catcher that her grandmother had given to her when she had told her about the scary dreams she had begun to have at age 6. The girl was 8 now, and still had her dream catcher pinned above her bed. The dream catcher had a circular hoop with the normal web-like design with various different colored beads spiraling out from the center, three feathers were attached, one on each side and one hanging down from the center.
As the girl restfully slept, a woman with long, black hair, dark brown eyes and a gentle face floated inside of the room looking at the child. She slowly moved towards the child's bed and looked at the dream catcher on the wall. Gently, she lifted it up and begun to study it.
"It's almost full," she thought.
When a dreamcatcher began to fill with nightmares, she would come and unravel them in a sense. To her, the nightmares looked like a ball of moving yarn, slowly filling the hoop. A dream catcher was full when the "yarn" had filled up the whole hoop. The nightmares that grew outside of the hoop infected the child's dreams. It was her job to unravel the nightmares leading them through the dream catcher where they were transformed into dreams.
This was her last check for the night, but unraveling always did take some time, especially when it was close to being full. The woman reached a hand to the ball, finding the end easily. She began to pull the end from the dreamcatcher as the black tendrils turned into gently moving strands of golden sand that slowly formed over the girls head into whatever she was dreaming. She glanced over and saw that the girl was dreaming of her grandmother and her pet dog. The woman focused back on her work.
As the stand grew longer, she started to step back farther and farther, slowly going around the room in an almost elegant dance as she spun away from different parts of the strands so as not to hit them. As the last of the nightmares are out she drifts over to the dreamcatcher, still pulling the strand of sand. Upon reaching the dream catcher, she lifted the strand and began to tie the sand to the bottom of the hoop.
This left the sand to stay in this room, to keep giving the child sweet dreams. The strands of sand continued to float around the room before the woman focused on the child. This was the fourth visit to this child this week alone. For others, it would almost a full month for a dream catcher to get as full as hers was.
"Maybe" she began to think "If I watched her dreams for a while I could see what's the cause of this odd influx of nightmares.
She hoped it wasn't the Boogeyman, the nightmare king himself, she had to deal with him once before and it had not ended well. At the memories, her hand reached up to gently rub the cut across her chest that went from her left shoulder to the bottom of her breasts on her right side. The cut was jagged due to the shape of the scythe that had struck her. That day he had left her to bleed out, which had been his downfall. Never turn your back on an enemy was the first rule they had to learn together, he had forgotten it.
The woman shook her head to dislodge her stray thoughts as she watched the girls dream. She was playing with a large golden retriever, waving a tennis ball in front of the dog before raising it up again to get the dog to jump. The girl in the dream turned her head as if called, to a porch where what the woman assumed was her grandmother stood with some food and drinks. The girl ran to the porch with the dog at her heels laughing all the way. She wrapped her grandmother in a hug when she reached her, both laughing now.
As the woman looked on the dream, she noticed some bits of nightmare floating towards the girl. But before she could grab it, it had touched the girl turning her sweet dream into a darkened nightmare.
The girl was in a graveyard, a grave, freshly dug, held a coffin at the opening, ready to be lowered to the ground. Everyone was wearing black and more than a few were crying. A reef of flowers held a single, enlarged picture. It was the grandmother. The girl looked confused, not knowing what was happening, she tugs on her mother sleeve and asked why grandma was in the box and why everyone was crying. The mother looked at her child with saddened eyes before replying that grandma was gone and that she wasn't coming back. The girl began to cry as well as she realized that this is what the older kids meant by death when someone didn't come back ever again. The mother picked up the little girl and rubbed her back as the girl cried, the mother quietly following suit.
The woman finally understood why this child's catcher was filling up so quickly. The child had finally learned of the concept of death. This happened to humans when a loved one has passed, their dreams would be filled with the memories they shared with the person who had passed. The humans would have these memories for some time, each time depending on how close they were to one another.
The woman sighed realizing that she would need to visit this little girl for some time to make sure she remembered the good times she had shared with her grandmother. Just because someone had passed, it didn't mean she was gone from one's heart.
The woman gently sat on the bed, back against the backboard and began to run her hand through the girl's hair as an attempt to sooth the girl's dreams. The girl's dream began to turn back to the sweet memories it had been once before, a smile stretching on the child's lips. The woman continues to run her hand through the child's hair, her lips rising slightly at the slight.
She remembered when she had kept the nightmares at bay for a certain little boy when they were training together. The woman slowly lost her smile as she remembered what had become of that soft-spoken boy, one who did everything he could in his powers to make others smile. She still had no clue what had happened to change him so drastically.
The woman stared out the child's window, still running her hand through the child's hair never faltering as she watches the sun begin it's rise, stretching its fingertips towards the sky letting light touch everything in reach. As the girl began to stir, the woman had stood up and left, leaving to rest for the next night to come.
A Dreamweavers job never ended until the moon stops rising was her motto after all.