Nightmares of a Screamy Baby

My son, he’s 10 months old. Funny kid. Has a cute broad smile that he often displays alongside hysterical laughter. Since he doesn’t have any language I can’t ask him what he is laughing about. Talking to him is a little like talking to the cat, except the cat understands what I’m saying a bit more than the baby does. The cat’s a grumpy sonofabitch, especially since the baby started stealing the attention she thinks is rightfully hers. She never smiles or laughs anymore. In demeanor, she’s less like the baby and more like a lazy and only-sometimes-entertaining version of Oscar the Grouch. But the cat and I have an understanding that goes something like this: Feed me on time and I don’t tear up your papers— I’ll probably still tear up your papers even if you feed me on time, whatever. Also, clean out my litter box on time or I shit on the floor.

The baby and I have no such understanding. He is smiley and laughy until he’s screamy and cry-y such as when he’s tired, he’s hungry, he’s annoyed, he’s soiled his diapers (so embarrassing for him), for no reason at all as far as I can tell, he’s caught me writing—which has been forbidden since the day of his birth (babies fucking hate literature)—he just wants to get on my nerves because he doesn’t like me, he’s happy and is experimenting with expressing it through nerve-rending wails and tears instead of smiles and laughter. Could be anything.

There’s one type of scream that baffles me more than the others though. It happens late at night after he’s split a few ear-drums, thrown his nightly fit and has nestled into sleep for a few hours. Sometimes I’m in another room licking my wounds, trying to process the new and pleasant sound around me (it’s silence) and I hear a solitary scream, it rattles me and I think: Shit, who’s torturing the cat?

After a second yelp, I realize it’s not the cat and I creep to the baby’s room and ease open the door. He’s in his crib thrashing about and levitating like he’s Regan and once again in the midst of possession.

My son during a horrible nightmare.

His head spins in an impossible, spine-churning fashion, he spits pea green vomit; there is a horrible smell in his room; and he tells me my mother is doing horrible things in Hell.

Sorry, I got carried away. None of that happens except the sleeping baby’s strange yelp, his thrashing and the horrible smell. The smell is the diaper pail, which stays full of magically generated shit-splattered diapers.

What’s strange about this yelp is that the kid remains sleeping even though he’s bobbing around. When I pick him up, he stops and then I gently rest his still-sleeping frame back into the crib. I can only assume that the screamy baby is having a nightmare.

Babies are mostly unconstructed territory. I wonder what a baby could possibly find so horrific. He’s probably not dreaming about showing up somewhere without a diaper and onesie. He doesn’t make much of a distinction between being naked and clothed and actually slightly prefers crawling around with his bare butt waving about, judging from the smile he flashes when he escapes as I’m changing him and his tears and thrashing when I catch him and attempt to put his clothes back on.

So what does a baby nightmare look like? Here’s my theory: He wakes up and he’s hungry. That’s enough for a hey-jack-I’m-hungry-where’s-the-woman-with-the-milk-scream, but that’s a light yelp. Not the one that becomes audible. Not the blood curdler that makes me think for a second that someone has shot an arrow into the cat. That scream comes next, just when the dream turns surreal. He sees someone coming toward him, unbuttoning a shirt to feed him. He smiles in joy and anticipation. That hollow feeling deep in his stomach will be filled. But when he’s lifted into the air, something feels terribly wrong. Where’s the pillowy softness that has been a lifespring? What’s the deal with all the belly flab. The boy yanks open the shirt and there’s just a scrawny milkless flatness sitting atop an overly round belly. What cruelty. It’s not his mother it all, but his father, the hapless buffoon. Leave me, you fool. I’m hungry and you lack the tools. The beautiful, beautiful tools! He wants to yell all of this and more, but he doesn’t have the language so he lets out a terrified, angry, lonely howl.

Whatever the case, I’m positive this kid’s nightmares revolve around eating. The boy fears nothing. He chases the cat as if she doesn’t have claws and the cat—the scratchmaster herself, author of some of my most interesting scars—cowers and runs. The one thing he fears is hunger. I noticed, back when I got him, that his first flashes of a smile occurred when he was asleep. With his lips, he’d make sucking motions as if a breast was pressed to his face and he’d smile and suck and smile and suck. That was the time I felt a true kinship with him for the first time as my most pleasurable dreams also involve breasts.

Rion Amilcar Scott writes fiction all over the damn place, tweets @reeamilcarscott and blogs at datsun flambe.